Wine-dark in a shallow lemon sea, pelted with capers, the curl of octopus ($16) looked messy and primeval, as if just plucked from the deep. It is the dish that a Greek restaurant lives or dies by, simple yet exacting. Tenderness should be victory enough. But the octopus at Boukiés had gone a step beyond, the flesh undoing itself, achieving a texture, at its core, close to nectar.  Four diners fell upon it, brandishing knives. And it was gone. Such is the transient pleasure of meze, the Greek tradition of small plates and the focus of Boukiés (pronounced boo-KAY-ess), an airy, casually elegant restaurant that opened in the East Village last spring.  Are we weary of small plates, those minuscule portions that so often add up to nothing but a lingering, belligerent hunger? Boukiés, which means “small bites,” does it right. The mezethes are robust, built for multiple hands to plunder, and priced reasonably, commensurate with their dimensions.  Still, you should know that these are dishes meant “not to sate but to tease,” according to the restaurant’s consulting chef, Diane Kochilas, the author of an epic 500-page cookbook, “The Glorious Foods of Greece,” and an authority on Greek cuisine. (She also is the consulting chef at Pylos, Boukiés’s older and more refined sister a few blocks away.)  You will wish for a bite more of the double-corona phyllo cigars rolled around meaty mushrooms ($12), and the giant white beans, as flat and smooth as river stones, braised and baked with spinach and feta until creamy inside ($10), and the hefty meatballs draped in a tomato sauce with a briny umami undertow ($13).  But a bevy of shrimp, basking with their tails in the air on a pat of roasted-red-pepper-and-almond paste ($17), could qualify as an entree. Likewise the ample heap of mussels ($14) in a tomato slurry, roused from slumber by the happy intrusion of smoked feta ($14).  Lamb is slow-braised with red wine until it collapses, then crammed into the pocket of a pita. It is a rebuke to the common slider. The meat hardly needs more than a dab of the accompanying thick yogurt, infused with mint and, from across the Mediterranean, the flowery heat of the North African spice blend ras el hanout ($13).  The menu, devised by Ms. Kochilas with the executive chef, Steffen Sander, includes reliable classics: an architectural Greek salad with two triangles of firm feta stacked atop tomato wedges and discs of cucumber ($14), and earthy spinach and feta pies with the gooeyness of a grilled cheese ($12). But taramosalata, a briny emulsion of carp roe and smoked trout, skews bitter, crying for more lemon ($10).  You will not miss bigger plates. But there are, in fact, two of them: a whole fish, grilled without elaboration ($26), and four baby lamb chops, prettily arranged so their bones resemble a splayed fan ($26). They are best appreciated as add-ons to a meal, not a culmination of it.  After all this meandering, it is somewhat anticlimactic to arrive at dessert. Here is a flat slab of chocolate cake ($6), haunted by a flavor somewhere between anise and eucalyptus, like the most delicious cough syrup you’ve ever had. The culprit is mastiha, the sap from the mastic tree. Less challenging is galaktoboureko ($6), what might happen if a mille-feuille ran off with a cheesecake: a colossus of pale custard held together by flaky layers of phyllo, with a trickle of honey.  The food does not need to be perfect. It is a backdrop for conversation, an excuse for drinking wine as you loll on a dangerously comfortable couch among pillars papered with antique maps. The floor-to-ceiling glass doors are slid back to let in the cool night air. The music, veering from cruise ship to pastoral, muffles the roar of Second Avenue. You yearn suddenly for white sandals, sandy ankles, the Aegean. Teased but not sated: another night in the city.  29 East Second Street (Second Avenue), (212) 777-2502, boukiesrestaurant.com.  RECOMMENDED Grilled octopus; mushroom phyllo pies; spicy meatballs; giant beans with spinach and feta; shrimp with roasted-red-pepper-and-almond sauce; pulled lamb sandwiches.  HOURS Monday to Thursday, 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.; Friday, 5 p.m. to 2 a.m.; Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., 5 p.m. to 2 a.m.; Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.  WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Sidewalk, dining room and handrail-equipped restroom are all on one level.
BoukiÃ©s in the East Village offers robust, reasonably priced small plates (mezethes) that are meant ânot to sate but to tease.â