Oil Resto

This daring, contemporary Greek restaurant is full of fresh ideas matched by very few other restaurants in more mainstream locales. Unfortunately, it's in the boondocks of one of Athens' working class suburbs and hard to get to. Current chefs, Dimitris Soutsou and Vasilis Tsaldaris bring spark, vigor and finesse to some of the most traditional Greek products and have an obviously well-honed knowledge of techniques to support the kind of boundary-breaking food they execute.
The space is minimal but cozy and almost modular, with four separate dining rooms, each decorated similarly and yet distinct.
It had been a while since I had visited a restaurant with a menu of so many unusual-sounding dishes it was actually hard to choose. At least one dish I wanted, the giouverlakia with trahana and manouri Sifnou, was finished by the time we arrived. But there was plenty more to sate us. Lots of the food was modular—in other words one main part and various accompaniments. One such dish is the chick peas, cooked traditionally like a thick stew except flavored with orange and Tahini, and served with thin slices of delicious prosciutto Evritanias and fresh orange wedges. The flavors worked so well together that I wondered why the chef didn’t simply marry them in the same dish. We loved the favokeftedes, too, which were really light to the point of breaking on the fork, and we loved the caper salad that accompanies them, which is really a mild, aromatic dip to be scooped up with each bite of kefte. The mastello cheese Saganaki with sweet olive paste was the least interesting of the mezedes mainly because the semolina crust wasn’t really that crusty and because the plate didn’t have the same refined presentation that other dishes had. The ladenia Kimolou is like a cheeseless pizza, more bread than anything else, with a topping of slightly dried tomato sauce and onions. It comes with an accompaniment of antrakla salad and smoked shrimp that were each delicious on their own but the trio together seemed a little disjointed to me, with the shrimp overpowering the other two. The contrasts in texture, sharpness of flavor etc. were not there as they were, say, with the chick peas. For me the winner among the appetizers was the dish of roasted leeks with tiny specks of singlino, orange sauce, rosemary and feta foam, which was really more like a creamy, mild cheese mousse. The leeks were a little underseasoned and fell too sweet against the stronger feta but with a little more salt the dish worked really well together. We loved the spinach salad with Mastiha dressing, too.
The main courses impressed us just as much. The karavida (langoustine) risotto, for example, is spiked with cardamom, which provides a sharp flavour shift from the round Italian flavors people expect in a comforting dish of risotto. The fresh cod was perfectly cooked, four pearly-white chunks in a light, aromatic tomato sauce, the flavour of which is heightened when you scoop it up with some of the caramelized onions on the plate. The tagliatele with herbs, lemon confit, tomatoes (we didn’t see any) and sage oil needed some punch, and maybe a little salt.
The bougatsa ice cream, named after a northern Greek cream-filled phyllo pastry, sounded more intriguing than it was. Essentially vanilla ice cream and phyllo in a very un-Greek small portion.
I really liked Oil Resto circa 2008. The food is totally Greek and yet totally original. The chefs work within an accepted vernacular and take it to new limits without disenfranchising the diner or making him feel lost in a sea of plates. I wish there were more places like this doing original Greek food with a flair, because that’s exactly what’s going on in the kitchen out there in the far off suburb of Liosia. Bravo. It’s worth the taxi ride.

Cuisine: Contemporary Greek

Athens Area: Ilion, westerb suburb

Decor: Lovely old house with enclosed garden, an urban oasis

Wine list: good and Greek

Prices: 40-45 euro per person

Address: 93 Idomeneos str., Ilion, Tel. 210 2693230