DineOutAthens

Kostas Souvlaki

2011-06-13T20:56:00.000-07:00

It’s not everyday that I lose total self control and give in to the temptation for Greece’s classic “junk food”—souvlaki. But when I do, there is only one place worth sacrificing self-esteem and birthright for: Kosta’s.

A tiny, hole-in-the-wall with a large following and an even larger queue, Kosta’s has been around for a few generations, serving up this Greek classic to legions of Athenians who happen to work or live or stroll in the immediate vicinity of Syntagma (Constitution) Square. The place, almost nondescript from the outside, is nonetheless pretty easy to recognize because a line of mostly men of the round-belly body type starts to form around 11.30 in the morning and doesn’t ease up until late afternoon. They typically leave with bags full of Kosta’s souvlaki, to share over a beer with their work buddies.

One caveat: The wait for a 2 euro souvlaki is an exercise in zen patience. It could take up to a half hour. Over the grill, where Kosta the younger (the original owner’s grandson) tends to skewers, hangs a sign that says, simply (in Greek): No Anxiety!

The wait is worth it because every component of the souvlaki here is perfect. The pita bread is grilled and smokey, just on the cusp of crunchy, and nothing like the greased-up pita wraps of other, lesser, souvlaki joints. Lamb is the meat of choice here, grilled over coals, juicy, tender, delicious. The fixings give Kostas’s souvlaki the brush strokes of culinary brilliance. First there is the yogurt, which is as thick as ice cream and unapologetically sour. Tomatoes are fresh and sweet, onions pungent and plentiful, parsley properly refreshing, and cayenne pepper spared no quarter for anyone who asks for it. Add to this the fact that the place is spanking clean, a rare thing, indeed, and what you get is the ultimate recipe for success. A, and one more jewel in this souvlaki’s crown: He will gladly prepare Greece’s national street food for…vegetarians.

Kosta’s Souvlaki

Mitropoleos & Pentelis St. 5

Tel. 210 322 8502

Price: 2 euro each

Magemenos Avlos (Magic Flute)

2011-06-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

The Magic Flute

It was quite by accident that I ended up dining at the “Magemenos Avlos” (Magic Flute), one of Athens’ oldest, and most history-filled, tavernas. To eat here is to step back in time.

The place, located just off Plateia Proskopon (“Scout Square”) in Pangrati, not far from the Hilton and the National Gallery, is as it was in its 1960s heyday, when it was the hangout for Greece’s most famous artists and musicians, including the internationally known composer Manos Hatzidakis, for whom the Magemenos Avlos was something of a second home.

The menu has the decided flavor of nostalgia, too, harking back to a time when dining out in Athens meant either an indulgence in Greek Sunday classics like braised rooster with noodles, or a foray into the continental (i.e. French) cuisine of the time: fondue, Tournedos Rossini, Viennese schnitzel, crepes, paillard, and duck a l’orange. Here and there are a few nods to “contemporary” Greek cuisine, in the form of chicken breast cooked with Chios Mastiha, which was actually pretty good.

The classics are competent: the rooster was a little dry but flavorful. The duck a l’orange was retro even in its plating, with rice and steamed vegetables. A green salad livened up with avocado, grapes, and sesame seeds was good. A plate of German-style sausages may not have a place much longer in the hostile-takeover atmosphere of Athens circa 2011!

The atmosphere is worth indulging in more than any plate we had. Dinner is still served with a serenade or two, performed with dramatic flair by the singer of the house and her two-man band. The walls are filled with pictures of a Greece in more innocent times, when people still danced in the aisles and on the tables and when the boundaries between common folk and the country’s rich and famous were not separated by barbed-wire and infra-red cameras. Around 1 a.m. the owner, with a group of friends, started crooning along with the singer. The repertoire seems to be religiously devoted to the music of Hatzidakis.

Despite the less-than-stellar food, we spent a most pleasant evening here basking in the retro glow of happier times for this beleaguered country.

Magemenos Avlos, Amynta 4, Pangrati

Tel. 210 72 23 195

Prices: 35 – 40 euro a person

ThaMa

2011-06-12T08:06:00.000-07:00

Thama is Greek dialect for miracle. The miracle of sorts that Thama represents is a Greek-crisis-born trend, the arrival of which has long been overdue: the mushrooming of reasonably priced, nicely appointed neighborhood restaurants with good, decent, even interesting, food.

If you’re willing to take a metro ride to the Nomismatokopeio station, about 10 minutes from Syntagma, you might want to venture here. Thama is virtually next to the station.

There’s a bonified chef in Thama’s kitchen, and he draws much of his inspiration from the southern Peloponnese, land of citrus, olive oil, olives, and more, which happens to be the owners’ birthplace. The region’s legendary olive groves, sprouting of sheer rock in an almost lunar landscape, are what have given inspiration to the simple, pared down décor here, too. Each table is decorated with an olive branches. A few potted trees hold court in the corner. The décor is plain and the lighting maybe a tad too bright, especially for evening meals.

At Thama, despite the fact that it’s really “just” a neighborhood restaurant, the plating is artful and the flavors marks above average. One plate we liked a lot were the stuffed eggplant. Don’t imagine a drooling imam bayaldi (eggplant halves overflowing with ground meat sauce). Here, stuffed eggplant comes cut like cups and filled with chunky, shredded, aromatic braised beef. Four pieces stand tall on beautiful, long plates. A broccoli “soufflé” comes served in small, individual terrines. The vegetable’s herbaceous character comes through loud and clear. A baked potato stuffed with cheese would win the hearts of any tater fan. It is literally dripping with a variety of Greek cheeses. Zucchini fritters were a little starchy, maybe because the vegetable was out of season in early spring, when we visited, and so a little more watery than normal. Mixed with flour, this turns to gum. The flavor, redolent of mint and other herbs, was good. There is also a host of regional, s. Peloponnese dishes to try here, from the tomato omelet, kagianas, to the grilled Kalamata sausage to the babanatsa, a local barley rusk salad.

Main courses were a little less focused. I liked the veal cutlet with feta sauce, although presentation-wise it was tired (plain rice).

A chocolate tart was as thick as fudge and came served with caramel ice cream.

Thama, Mesogeion 242, Holargos

Tel.: 211 013 9951

Prices: 20 – 30 euro

Fishalida

2011-06-12T03:54:00.000-07:00

Optimism in Greece is in short supply these days, so visiting a new restaurant filled with hope (and people) was refreshing to say the least. Fishalida is one such place.
The recipe for “success” at this new fish restaurant in Pangrati is as old as the hills: Location, location, location (very centrally located at a short walk from the Hilton and the Evangelismos Metro stop); a bright, original, and inviting interior that communicates lightheartedness; a good relationship between price and quality and a menu filled with playful, tasty dishes created by two young chefs.
The space is done up in shades of sea blues and coral, with funky lighting fixtures, bubble motifs and a general, all-around, happy feel.
As the name implies, the fruits of the sea fill the bowl here. We loved the house-marinated anchovies, plated to resemble a star, crisp and clean in flavor and perfectly toothsome in texture, the result of having spent just the right amount of time in salt and vinegar to “cook” without toughening up. The grilled bread, aka bruschetta, topped with crabmeat was simple and cutsy. The taramosalata was excellent: silky, sharp, balanced with proper acidity. I loved the smoked mackerel and lentil appetizer, cooled by a bed of raw, shredded, marinated zucchini. The combo of beans and smoked or grilled fish or seafood is one that has been evolved over the last few years here as chefs look to tradition but also to contemporizing the classics. A squid-ink risotto with strips of cuttlefish was delicious and bravely black. A heap of fried tiny Simi-island shrimp was as easy to eat as popcorn at the movies. Other specialties include retty damn good Greek fries, sun-dried octopus, and aromatic tsipouro (Greek fire water) from Thessaly.
Fishalida: 2 Naiadon & Antinoros street
Tel.: +30 210 723 4551
E-mail: fishalida@gmail.com
Website: http://www.fishalida.gr

Skoufias

2011-03-01T08:38:00.000-08:00

The vicinity of the new Benaki Museum, on Piraios Street in Redi, an old, industrial part of Athens that is slowly being gentrified, is still a gastronomic no man's land. After a recent visit to the museum, to see the work of the Greek architect Pikionis (he designed, among other things, the stone pathway leading up to the Acropolis), we ended up at Skoufias, a traditional taverna right across the street.

Skoufias has good energy. Young but traditional, filled with old and new chachkas and contemporary Greek art, it has just the right artsy feel for an apres museum outing. The menu, hand-written in a traditional school notebook, is simple. Most familiar dishes have a twist.

Out of six salads, we tried two, the potato salad with oranges, inspired by the use of oranges in the southern Peloponnese region of the Mani, and the Mesogeiaki (Mediterranean), basically a slaw with yogurt dressing, the main difference being that the cabbage was cut in large, unwieldy strips that were hard to pierce with a fork and even harder to fit in your mouth! A plate of dolmades (stuffed grape leaves) was of the vegetarian kind, stuffed with rice, raisins and pine nuts and served "yalantzi" --with yogurt. They were tender, flavorful, and good. The fava, a puree of yellow split peas, was nothing out of the ordinary. It is served cold, which I have a pet peeve about. Grilled pleurotus mushrooms were simple and competent, while the pita kaisarias, a buttery (quite so) mass of phyllo pastry, pastourma, tomatoes, and kasseri cheese was a little laden, but the combination is always seductive to me. A prasotigania (pork and leeks cooked in a small skillet) was a little tough.

Main courses were simple and competent, with nothing stellar to recall. A pork loin stuffed with peppers and feta and wrapped in grape leaves was a little dry; the salmon with eggplant cream, a special the day we went and a take on the classic Anatolian Greek dish, hounkiar begendi, typically made with lamb or beef, suffered from an overly sour eggplant cream that knocked the flavor balance off kilter.

The atmosphere, lively, urban and artsy, is definitely more of a reason to try this fun little place than is the actual food.

Dessert was a totally over scoop of kaimaki ice cream (flavored with mastiha) and spoonfuls of the Greek sour cherry preserve, vyssino.

Skoufias, Megalou Vasileiou 50, Rouf
Tel. 210 341 2252
Prices: 17 - 22 euro per person with wine

Flavours of Northern Greece: FLAVOURS OF NORTHERN GREECE: A CULINARY JOURNEY

2011-02-23T07:32:00.000-08:00

Flavours of Northern Greece: FLAVOURS OF NORTHERN GREECE: A CULINARY JOURNEY: "Wine Roads of Northern Greece: An 8-Day Culinary Journey Greek Food Guru Diane Kochilas and Greek Food Blogger Peter Minakis (a.k.a. Kalofa..."

Adamo

2011-02-09T07:05:00.001-08:00

Anyone who wants to get a sense for how the well-to-do party, Greek style, should take a cab ride about 6 km (4 miles) north of central Athens to the suburb of Neo Psychico. Here you’ll find the chichiest shops and some of the city’s most crowded restaurants, cafes and bars. On the main strip jutting out from the big A/B (pronounced Alpha-Beta) supermarket everything from traditional fare to Sino-Greek fusion, to Italian food can be samples. My last visit here was to the newest addition, Adamo, a bustling be-everything-to-everyone place that is part cigar bar, part café, part enoteca, and part restaurant. It sits in a space once occupied by Dioskouroi, in its heyday a very well-known Greek taverna. We sat in the quietest spot in the restaurant, at the one table inside the glass-enclosed cava, but it was still hard to hear my neighbor.

Adamo is for ears more resilient than mine, or maybe for diners who also don’t mind donning ear plugs. Is it worth the trek north for this? Probably not. Better, much better, Italian food can be found downtown.

All the classics are on the menu, from carpaccio of bresaola, to the married-forever duo of prosciutto and mozzarella (buffalo), to vitello tonnato.

Most of what we tried was a little heavy-handed; much of it was drenched in oil. A plate of grilled vegetables with thyme vinairette and buffalo-milk mozzarella was denser and wetter than it needed to be. Vegetables grilled included red peppers, zucchini, and carrots. I would have tried the scallop (fresh from the Aegean, but where? Are scallops a native of Greek waters?) carpaccio with truffles, but a 93 euro price tag prevented me ordering it (as a starter BTW). I love vitello tonnato, but skipped it here, mainly because my dining companions opted instead for a few risotti and more. An appetizer of hot radicchio stuffed with mozzarella, prosciutto, parmesan, and arugula, dressed in the all-powerful balsamic turned out to be better than expected, the pleasant bitterness of the vegetable playing nicely against the sweet, almost syrupy consistency of the dressing.

It’s hard to go wrong with the intoxicating aromas of a truffle risotto, even if it is a bit played out. This one was competent. So was the Milanese risotto, if a bit staid and run of the mill. (It happened that I had just tasted another one, at the new Fuga near the Athens Music Hall, which was ethereal.) The tagliata with greens come served on a sizzling hot plate. The meat was a little tough.

Desserts included a tiramisu, a chocolate soufflé, and a lemon tart. Everything here was designed to be a risk-free collection of classics that satisfies the average Joe, even if he’s driving a Porsche Cayenne.

Dim. Vasileiou 16, Neo Psychiko

Tel. 210 671 3997

Prices: 35 – 50 euro a person

Efimeron

2011-02-09T07:04:00.001-08:00

There are very few real neighborhood places in Athens, hang outs where office types congregate after work for a beer or a glass of wine and something to nibble on. Efimeron is one such place, located right around the corner from the brand new Onassis cultural center, Stegi Grammaton & Technon (Center for Letters and the Arts).

Efimeron remonds me wholeheartedly of a Parisian tabac. It’s smoky, there is a large catalogue of cocktails, wines, and beers to choose from, and the food, although simple, is a lot better than I anticipated. Of course, you can also just sit and enjoy a coffee, at prices much less than those at the Ledra Marriott across the way. Its location is a boon, since all around the neighborhood, up and down Syngrou Avenue, office buildings crowd the streets.

If you’re here for breakfast, indulge in an omelet; for lunch a decent club sandwich might be the thing; for that time in between lunch and a typical Greek dinner (never before 10 p.m.) there is a fair amount to pick from.

A chicken salad with croutons, parmesan, bacon and cherry tomatoes was a little leaden thanks to a syrupy dressing. But the portion was generous enough to be called a main course. The beef (is it really veal, as stated) burgers, biftekakia in Greek, are pretty good and pretty juicy. A pasta with salmon surprised us. It was prepared with whole wheat pasta, for one, a rarity on restaurant or snack bar menus. There was no cream in the sauce. And the fish, smoked salmon, was plentiful.

We shared a bottle of Palivou rosé, with a luscious body and plenty of texture, and we reveled in a scene unfolding where 30-somethings unwound after a tough day at the office. This was a sliver of Athens I had never really known.

Efimeron, Evridamantos Street 15

Neos Kosmos

Tel. 210 9324414

Prices: 15 – 20 euro per person

Valentina

2011-02-09T07:03:00.001-08:00

This is about the defrocking of a cult hero!

About 20 years ago, when we first moved to Athens, Valentina, in the boondocks of Kallithea, a working class neighborhood that is home to many of the most recent Greek immigrants from the farthest reaches of the former Soviet Union, used to be the place we escaped to for real food from one of Greece’s least known regional diaspora populations, the Rossopontioi (Greeks from the Black Sea). The place was refreshingly unadorned. Décor consisted of just a plain glass exterior, white curtains, a few chatchkas, and busty older blonds with mile-high twists of hair sipping tall glasses of vodka and Fanta. Their better halves smoked stinky cigarettes. Borscht, garlicky carrot salad, meat-stuffed cabbage leaves, and the best skewered meat in Athens were among the dishes we flocked here for. Driving to Valentina 20 years ago was an experience that combined food and social anthropology.

Then the place burnt down, suspiciously.

Then its owner and his family rebuilt it. The new, improved version was really just an updated rendition of immigrant bland, without any real character, less so than before, actually. The menu remained exactly the same.

That could have been a good thing, except that when you have fond taste memories of unique food, a 10-plus-year lapse requires either a leap of faith or a fall into the simmering hostilities of gustatory disappointment. We had the latter and came home with our memories bruised.

The shredded carrot salad with a watered down mayo dressing was so garlicky it repeated on me for two days. The “rossiki”—a Russian-style potato salad that has long been popular in Greece—consisted of, well, chunks of boiled potatoes. Frozen peas dethawed and cooked, carrots and mayonnaise. Like much else, it fell flat on this palate. The pelmeni are like raviolis but with absolutely no finesse. They must buy them frozen and cook them straight from the freezer. The flavor was totally flat and the meat inside popped out like little knobs with the slightest touch of the fork. Blinis, basically crepes, filled with a sour creamy cheese, were the best starch-cheese combo by far. I ordered a bowl of Smetana, which is a silky yogurt dip, to go with the lamb kebab, called saslik. Saslik is also made with turkey (a new addition to the menu) and with pork. It was pretty good. The meat marinates for a long time before it hits the grill on long metal skewers. When served it comes topped with ample shavings of raw red onion and a sprinkling of cayenne.

The garlic in everything haunted me for days afterwards. The meal left me feeling heavy and dense, with none of the ethereal pleasures I had remembered from Valentina’s more youthful days almost two decades ago.

Lykourgou Street 235, Kallithea

Tel. 210-9431871

Prices: 14-18 euro per person

KOUZINA Breeze Cafe

2011-02-09T07:02:00.001-08:00

Restaurant finds are a rare thing in Athens. The kind of places you simply stumble upon that turn out to be great are few and far between. Breeze Café is one such place.

Situated on the lower plaza in the Agia Paraskevi suburb (a place that once was home to Athens’ very first pizzaria), Breeze Café serves forth haute Greek cooking at affordable prices, turned out by one of the city’s most talented young chefs, Gikas Xenakis, who did a stint at the Michelin-starred Spondi. The venue itself might confuse a casual passerby at first. It looks like all the other “all-day” cafes on the strip, with an outer wall of movable glass that opens in summer and a very casual aura. In fact it is open all day, for coffee and snacks, but at night it morphs into a fine dining restaurant. There is a bit of a disconnect between the quality of the food and the energy of the space, but the owners are moving along with some design changes to sync the room and the menu more harmoniously.

Our first plate was a gorgeous “millefeuille” of Portobello mushrooms and goat’s cheese, stacked over a thin pool of fire-engine red (but sweet) pepper sauce. An ersatz pizza-tart came loaded with whole small roasted tomatoes, prosciutto in billowy folds, boccancini balls and arugula, a peasant dish that went upwardly mobile without losing its soul. I loved the special of the day: squid cut into disks that were meant to look like scallops and did, served over a carrot foam and on two small tasty dollops of roasted eggplant salad. The chef plays with a pan-Mediterranean palette. Paella is on the menu, in spirit if not in form. Here it is made with orzo not Valencia rice, but all the right flavors are there, right down to the think rounds of chorizo that add a land-lubber’s richness to the shrimp and baby squid. It was wonderful. Ditto on a rabbit dish that came deconstructed and rebuilt in two ways: as a fritter, all crunchy and golden on the outside, and as two lobes of tender white rabbit meat served in an orange sauce over soft, comforting, cooked wheat. The ossobuco won me over, too, but for one thing. For some reason, Athenian chefs like to serve this hero’s cut without the bone, losing all sense of drama in its presentation. Xenakis serves the meat, which is meltingly tender, over a bed of polenta. The dish is delicious but its presentation is literally flat.

I loved the acidic, puckish lemon curd tart but could have done without strawberies in January. The tiramisu was topsy-turvy in a martini glass, rich, aristocratic, and velvety.

Breeze Café is a little out of the way for the average visitor in a downtown hotel, but now with the metro stop a few minutes away, it’s easy to get to and well worth it.

Dinner here costs somewhere around 40 euros, most of the time with wine, too. It would be double that if this place were downtown.

Agiou Ioannou 102, Agia Paraskevi

Tel. 210 6009092.

Prices: 35-45 euro per person

Askimopapo (The Ugly Duckling)

2011-02-09T07:01:00.000-08:00

How could Frank Bruni, the New York Times’ former restaurant critic, miss the ugly duckling, which is what Askimopapo translates to, when he wrote a recent roundup of traditional Athenian tavernas? Indeed, Askimopapo is one of this city’s oldest holes in the wall, located in one of its oldest neighborhoods, together with a handful of other traditional tavernas and a slew of newer, sleaker places. It’s so old it’s a kind of temple to Athens of another era.

Askimopapo wreaks of history. The taverna was opened by the current owner’s father and was actually the original family home. The walls are covered with old Greek objects, from musical instruments to 50-year-old black and white photos. Braids of garlic hang from the rafters. Smells of traditional food waft from the kitchen.

The taverna interpretation of “tradition” unfortunately means almost nothing but meat, which always struck me as odd, given Greece’s wealth of main course vegetable dishes. On weekends, the specialty of the house is chick pea soup. We visited midweek, when the menu is scaled back to include about five or six main course meat dishes (mainly stews), a few salads, a phyllo pie or two, usually with cheese, and boiled greens.

We sampled a cheese and pasturma pie, called pita kaisarias, which glistened with butter and resonated with the spicy flavors of the cured beef (pasturma). A beef stew in paper was homey and comforting. The salad, a large, overflowing platter of grated carrot, cabbage, lettuces, arugula and more, was just right. Dessert was the taverna classic halva, the lagniappe almost all old-school holes in the wall like this treat their customers to when the meal is over.

Wines are bulk and served in quarter and half liter carafes.

Ionon 61 Petralona

Tel. 210 346 3282

Note: The taverna is about a 12 minute cab ride from central Athens.

Greek Diples - Fried Dough with Honey. Yum!

2011-01-24T13:19:00.000-08:00

FUGA

2011-01-21T09:53:00.000-08:00

This business of reviewing restaurants usually sounds more glamorous than it is. Most of the time, people who eat for a living end up eating a lot of very mediocre meals and a few very good ones in any given year. This year, 2011, got off to a great start for me with a visit to Athens’ newest haute dining spot, Fuga, which belongs to the Athens Concert Hall and is perched on the top of the hill right behind Hall.

Getting up there is either a climb or an elevator ride through the labyrinthine catacombs beneath the Concert Hall. When you finally find your way, the room, simply and elegantly appointed in wood and glass, makes you feel somehow light. It’s the view, of course, overlooking Athens, the modern city. At night, with the Athenian hills silhouetted in the background, and lights flickering everywhere, it’s easy to forget this is the same Athens of suffocating strikes and civil strife. Gravure-like projections of classical composers and a gravure-like wall remind us, like its name, a play on fugue, is part of the grand Concert Hall (Megaron Mousikis in Greek).

For a time, before coming, I had a fixed idea that this very iconic space overlooking moderns Athens needed to serve modern Greek food. That was before I sipped the first taste of a warm carrot soup studded with rosemary croutons and indulged wholeheartedly in one of the most delicious meals I have had in a long time here. The chef, Pantaleo de Pinto, is a protégé of 2-star Michelin chef Andre Berton. The food achieved a level of artfulness rarely seen in this city while maintaining its earthy Mediterranean roots. Much on Fuga’s menu is a paean to Italian classics, but nothing wehad was even remotely cliché, either in presentation or flavor.

I feared the buffalo milk mozzarella-tomato-basil trio would be pedestrian, since this dish now belongs to the rank of international food. What arrived at our table was a visual garden of delights: mozzarella, tender and milky, cut into small wheels, each one with a tasty core of jelled tomato. The basil sauce spread out like a star beneath the rolls. A sprouting of lettuce and other tender salad leaves at the top gave the dish the aura of a flower that had just bloomed. The whole thing was very subtle and soothing on the palate. The warm cod ad steamed vegetable salad had an entirely different composition. This came like a game board with pieces of zucchini, broccoli and more upright on the plate, softened by bite-sized chunks of perfectly salted fresh cod. We poured a little more olive oil over it, morphing it into a more “Greek” dish that way. The vitello tonato, so often heavy handed and stodgy, was another salute to the breeziness that the room itself inspires, despite the earth-water duet on the plate. The veal came in two rounds of perfectly cooked, very tender loins, crunchy with a bit of sea salt; the tonato was a dollop of sauce on the plate. One caper berry had to suffice for the two of us (I got it!). Strips of crisped celery were woven into a stack on the plate.

All the starches beckoned to be sampled, so we had to chose: the rigatoni Amatriciana and the classic risotto Milanese. Both were superb. The risotto, served in a shallow bowl with a wide lip, was the color of wet marigolds, swirled with veal juice which added a discernible depth of flavor (not that the risotta wasn’t rich and perfectly al dente to begin with). The Amatriciana was playful: served forth with each piece of perfectly cooked rigatoni upright in a filled circle on the plate, wrapped in sauce, with three strips of crisped pancetta, all pink and white stripes, jutting out like flags. I wish there were more pasta on the plate, especially for the 18 euro price tag, because it was delicious.

We shared a main course, the osso buco, which comes osso-less! Oddly, I thought this was the weakest dish because deboning deflated the anticipation of drama that is inherent in more typical presentations. The potato puree that accompanies the osso buco is something I aspire to in my own kitchen: so smooth it’s almost liquid, but with not even a hint of gumminess.

Next, came dessert: the panna cota is a study in contradictions but opposites, after all, attract. The cream was silky with evident body, served in a parfait-like glass, and topped with a crunchy granita of frozen espresso. I couldn’t get enough of either. In the chocolate pave I thought the contrasts were a little untamed, the dense opulence of a delicious chocolate ganache whipped by a very tart mango sorbet. I wanted more harmony.

One detail that remained with me all night: just as heels do make a woman’s legs prettier, so do proper plates give an aesthetic boost to the food. Fuga’s plates are all white and expansive but in a way that embraces each dish.

Kudos.

Athens Area: Centrally located, just above the Megaron Mousikis (Athens Concert Hall)

Décor: Expansive and uplifting, with a great view of the modern city below

Service: Excellent

Wine List: Italian, French and Greek wines dominate the list

Prices: 50-70 euro without wine. Our bill for two came to 171 euro with a bottle of Ktima Merkouri, one of the least expensive (Greek) reds on the list.

AddressL Vas. SOfias & Kokkali 1, Central Athens

Tel. 210 7242979

Open daily from 8 p.m. til midnight

Jimmy and the Fish

2011-01-17T03:47:00.000-08:00

Right after Easter and a week of languishing on the Island of Longevity (Ikaria) I came back to Athens still in vacation mode. I wanted to bask in the feeling of being a tourist in my adopted city, so, together with family freshly arrived from abroad, we headed to the trap of all tourists, Mikrolimano, and to an old standard bearer of sea-view cuisine, Jimmy and the Fish. This, of course, after driving past more than a few waiters with menus in their hand, out on the traffic-clogged quay, saying things like “Fis [sic] for giou]” and “kam een, ouee park.” The parking, it turns out, is a cooperative affair shared between all the restaurants along the water, since the guy who took my keys asked me which restaurant I’d be at. One thing I was glad for: we were the only “tourists” at Jimmy’s. Everyone else seemed as Greek as could be, folks who know the place, might be regulars, and come not only the view of docks and yachts but also for more than decent food in a place that’s survived the waves for nearly two decades.

Jimmy doesn’t serve up the most innovative fish cuisine in town (that’s the domain of stars like Varoulko and Milos); rather it serves up an accessible menu of greatest hits that pair well with gregarious conversation and a good bottle of Mantineia Tselepou, which is what we had with dinner. The menu is big and most of the fish offerings are frozen, but at least they are honest about it. The starters include a wide array of classics, such as marinated anchovies (gavros), sea urchin salad, seafood salad, grilled octopus, classic feta-stuffed squid and more. We tried the classic fried squid, which were fresh not frozen that day and very good—crunchy thanks to a thick batter coating and very tender within. They come served with remoulade. One non-fish thing we sampled was actually not that great, even though it’s simple enough to make: grilled pleurotus mushrooms. They had a slightly bitter aftertaste and were a little rubbery. But the grillman did a great job on the fresh sardines, butterflied and boned and served with a generous topping of slightly charred onions. I can eat that any time.

Two cooked dishes we tried were above average but far from haute: the risotto with saffron, salmon roe (brik) and langoustines was toothsome and too fluffy to be thought of as a proper risotto, more pilaf than risotto to these taste buds. The ravioli stuffed with seafood and ricotta was better and more comforting, recalling memories of fun meals in nonseaside locales like New York’s Little Italy. The portion was very generous, the filling tasty, the sauce a little too thick but not bad.

Here ended our cruise of Jimmy’s menu, without a dock stop at the panacotta, brownies, tarte tatin or crème brulee that are in the dessert section of the menu.

The service here is a little gruff, the waiters a little rough around the edges without being outright rude though, kind of like sailors on their best behavior in some exotic port of call.

Cuisine: Fish and Seafood

Athens Area: Mikrolimano, Piraeus, about 40 minutes from downtown

Decor: Maritime classic with a great view of the sea and fancy yachts

Service: A little rough around the edges

Wine list: Greek and reasonably priced

Prices: 45-55 euro a person

Address: Koumoundourou 46, Mikrolimano, Piraeus

Tel: 210 412 4417

Kiku

2011-01-17T02:40:00.000-08:00

I know it might seem out of sync with the times to be writing about one of the city’s most expensive restaurants, but I can justify it by saying that we ate very well and voted for treating ourselves during the holidays to something a little chicer than a neighborhood taverna.

A night out at Kiku, in the hands of master sushi chef Τανάκα Μινόρου, who has been with the restaurant since its inception more than a decade ago, is the guarantee a lovely meal, filled with classics and not-so-classics of Japanese cuisine.

The restaurant hasn’t changed much since it opened, despite a recent change of hands. The same pared down, minimalistic design in basic beiges and blacks characterizes the space. The sushi bar is still a favorite place to sit. Even the waitstaff is more or less the same. I hadn’t been here in years but recognized the waiter.

Everything we sampled was beautifully and artfully presented, starting with a simple plate of edamame (soy beans) and fleur de sel. The miso soup had finesse, too. I loved the totally over-the-top Sino-French concoction known as Hakko Unagi Foie Gras, a delectable combination of smoked eel and seared foie gras in the form of pressed sushi. The lavraki with spicy mayonnaise won me over, too, especially since this is usually the kind of dish I avoid on sushi menus anywhere. The assortment of sashimi (riceless pieces of raw fish) was perfect and perfectly fresh. The rolls had flavor profiles you could actually discern. The dish that sparked my interest, especially since I love a version of it made by Greek chef Christoforos Peskias at P-Box, is the eggplant with miso. It was soft and pillowy—as close to comfort food Japanese style as you can get without serving a bowl of steaming noodles. Miso works incredibly well with grilled eggplant.

Blackened cod is a de riguer dish on high end Athens sushi menus as well as on a few non-sushi menus (like Kuzina’s in Thiseon). This was very simple, well-grilled, and tender. The miso sauce worked in subtle ways here. Next, just for fun (!), we ordered the grilled rib-eye with chili sauce and kolokythakia. Rare, juicy, beautifully plated, this was a dish after my American meat-eaters heart.

Desserts were delicious, even the cliché dish of fried ice cream, which here was delicate and light. My favorite was a toss up between the sesame crème brulee and the chili-spiced warm chocolate cake.

Kiku is definitely a treat, typically for steeper pockets than mine, but I relished every bite.

Cuisine: Japanese sushi and contemporary Japanese food

Atmosphere: Subtle, civilized, elegant

Service: Excellent

Wine List: Excellent, with a good selection of Sake

Prices: 60+ euro a person

12 Dimokritou Str., Kolonaki, Athens. +30 210 3647033

Kollias Fish Taverna on Syngrou Ave.

2011-01-17T01:55:00.001-08:00

Many fish-loving Athenians have been a fan of Tassos Kollias and his heartfelt taverna in the boondocks of Piraeus. Kollias was the place to venture to for a foodie excursion: the fish was always fresh (and Greek), the meze fare excellent and convivial, the atmosphere delightfully kitch with seafarers’ chatchkas everywhere, and every meal punctuated by the neighborhood’s roving accordion and clarinet players who kept Kollias on their must-go-to list. But Kollias has moved up in the world, to a neighborhood that is fast becoming a restaurant hotspot, thanks to the newly minted Onassis Cultural Center, on Syngrou Avenue. In the vicinity, three pricey fish tavernas already compete for business: Thalassinos, Kollias, and TTT.His move to a grander space was bold, especially in these hard economic times. Many of his signature elements are in tact here, just redesigned: an open kitchen, a display of mezedes, and an expanded display of all the fresh, wild fish he has built his reputation on over the years. He doesn’t work with farmed fish. So, you might find a large, wild red mullet, as we did the night we went; or a bowl full of spinialo, a unique, rare preserved shellfish from the Dodecanese island of Kalymnos, that was a sponge-fishermen’s staple in the months they spent at sea. His seafarers’ chatchkas are still around, there are just fewer of them in the new space, which is light and airy, pared down, but still infused with the owner’s warm and friendly energy.The fresh fish is amazing here. On our recent visit, about two months ago, we were privy to some rare species of Aegean fish: the tiny sparos, a kind of sea bream; Those oversized wild mullets I mentioned above, which he grilled to flaky nirvana, and a small snapper, sauteed perfectly. His meze fare is less elegant and far less elemental than the simply prepared fish. Here, Kollias loses a bit of restraint, confusing ingredients and getting stuck on a few motifs, such as rolls. Not sushi rolls, but rolled up eggplants stuffed with mussels and cheddar, hardly a Greek combo and one that detracts from what is basically a good idea. He rolls up strips of roasted red Florina peppers, stuffing them with crabmeat, the delicacy of which gets lost under the briny flavor of the peppers. He rolls up filleted sardines and anchovies, stuffing them with herbs and various other things; These work better, especially for ouzo and tsipouro (Greek eau de vie). I loved a plate that wasn’t all rolled up: squid ink orzo with cuttlefish and pomegranate seeds. The sepia (cuttlefish) was as soft as butter. Kollias dessert menu tends towad the overwrought, a common thread in many seafood restaurants in Athens. Syrup-infused seker pare biscuits with deliciously gummy mastiha-flavored ice cream are an all-time classic here. Kollias: Syngrou Avenue 303, right across the street from the Onassis Heart CenterTel: 21- 9408620Service: ExcellentPrices: 35-55 euro a person with wineWine list: very good prices on a very large selection of Greek wines Atmosphere: homey and cozy despite the sizeOpen for lunch on weekdays

To Ouzeri tou Mitsou

2010-12-21T04:37:00.000-08:00

Can misery be fun? That is the question when you set out for an Italian restaurant of some repute in downtown Halandri, a well-known suburb north of Athens, on a rainy Wednesday night, after having called just a few days earlier, only to discover that in the course of 72 hours said restaurant has gone out of business. Hmm. Where to go with two girlfriends for a final tipple and some tidbits before we all separate for Christmas? It was then that I remembered the lines, out the door, indeed, on most Saturdays when I happened to pass by a tiny hole in the wall right behind the main church on restaurant row in Halandri. The place: to Ouzeri tou Mitsou, a narrow, old-fashioned taverna with old-fashioned clientele: older guys with worry beads and retsina and cigarettes clustered in small groups, a few oddly modern couples, replete with pierced body parts and tatoos and chemical hair, and then us, three young-at-heart middle-aged ladies out for an easy meal and some wine-induced cheer.

I know this sounds strange, but this little ouzerie is, well, pleasantly miserable! I mean sooo simple and basic, with service and a menu to match, recalling the innocent, taverna-stuffed days of my youth. The food was fine. Decent fava (yellow split pea puree) come served warm (how to tell decent fava: it should be creamy and not pasty, and, yes, it is best served slightly warm). A classic plate of boiled zucchini came boiled to just the right point where al dente meets softness. The saganaki (fried cheese) was totally old-world style, encased in a thick batter before it hits the fryer, properly oozing within, with no extraneous “creative” additions that sometimes embellish but also sometimes mar the pure pleasure of indulging in artery-clogging food. Horta (greens) came as horta should: soft and pillowy and deep green, with a good dousing of our national treasure, olive oil, generously soaking it. Lemon on the side, of course.

We had the bakaliaro skordalia (fried cod with garlic dip), which was not an abridged version! Plenty of garlic in a dense, textural bread-based skordalia (garlic dip), the old-fashioned kind. A plate of fried small shrimp that were plucked out of the waters of Evia earlier in the day or week were more medium-sized than bite-sized and so needed to be purged of their heads before eating.

Mitso’s Ouzerie is a simple, rustic place, fitting, perhaps for these times, when we still want to go out, but just can’t afford to! I am beginning to long for the foamy days of yore when fava was infused with truffle oil and bakaliaros-skordalia was just a name open to interpretive cooking!

Cuisine: classics meze dishes to accompany with ouzo
Athens Area: northern suburbs
Decor: narrow, old-fashioned taverna, a bit rough around the edges but pleasantly retro
Service: ok
Prices: 12-15 euros a person
Address: 8, Eleftheroton square, Halandri, tel.: 210 6840229

ManiMani

2010-12-21T04:26:00.000-08:00

We had guests in town and wanted to go somewhere fashionably…inexpensive. ManiMani turned up on my radar screen, a place I’ve wanted to return to after visiting it when it first opened a few years ago. I am always interested in places that showcase the cuisine of a particular region, in this case the dry, majestic southern Peloponnese, known for its exquisite olive oil, meagre but essential cooking, and tough locals.

There is definitely a lot more from the Mani on the menu today than there was a few years back. Singlino (cured pork in olive oil), talagani (a lovely grilling cheese from Messinia, in the Pelop.), various local pastas, and more are among the ingredients that crop up all over the menu. Orange and lemon, so important in the flavor palette of the southern Peloponnese, grace many dishes. The space, an old house near the Acropolis Museum, is lovely, well preserved, and simply but pleasantly appointed, the kind of space most of us can easily fantasize living in.

Despite the numerous things in its favor, ManiMani disappointed us a little. The main reason has to do with where the emphasis is in the kitchen and on the menu: making the plates look impressive but not tending as carefully as possible to the actual flavors in each dish. A trilogy of cold dips (fava (yellow split pea puree), tyrokafteri (spicy cheese dip), melitzanosalata (eggplant salad)) comes in annoyingly small portions. Ditto on the trilogy of saganakis (fried cheese), one with haloumi cheese, one with talagani cheese, one with manouri cheese. There were four of us, and it wasn’t enough to go around. Looked good, though! The homemade ravioli filled with chard, myronia(wild chervil), kafkalithres (Mediterranean hartwort) and served with feta cheese sauce seemed anemic. I expected a really flavorful filling and a pungent sauce and what I got were a few insipid half-moons barely filled with greens and a sauce where the cheese had either been left out or was so little that it was indiscernible. The greens salad with a round of grilled manouri cheese, served as an upright cylinder, looked great and tasted fine.

We ordered three mains. The rooster with noodles was very salty, and that noted from a palate that adores salt. I liked the fried salt cod a lot, although I thought there was a little too much going on on the plate between the bed of greens and the various inter-flowing sauces in different colors. The lavraki (sea bass) with fennel cream was perfectly pan-seared, crisp and tender; the fennel cream could have had more personality.

We skipped dessert but indulged in two bottles of wine.

A little refinement is what ManiMani needs. If they achieve that, customers will come a-running, mani-mani (in greek this expression means quickly)…

Cuisine: Specialties and inspirations from the Southern Peloponnese

Athens Area: Athens neighborhood (Acropolis metro station)

Decor: simple, cozy, Greek

Service: good

Wine List: good

Prices: 25-35 euro a person

Address: 10, Falirou str., Koukaki, tel.: 2109218180

Hatskar

2010-12-21T04:10:00.000-08:00

Cheap but not chic, delicious but not beautiful. These are the words I’d use to describe Hatskar, a small family restaurant in the northern suburb of Maroussi that serves very good, homemade Armenian dishes.

The waiter calls out to the chef after I ask him a question: “Mama, what’s in the pasous dolma (bean-stuffed pickled cabbage)?” Mama, the chef, is a kerchief-clad, plump very good cook who personally brings over the dish. We enjoy every bit of it.

Hatskar refers to a cross carved into wood. The restaurant is small, bright, and very plain. If there were a few cozier touches and a little less light the space would be much more pleasant and would do the food, which is delicious, justice. If it looked better, I'd even recommend a taxi ride north, for those adventurous and curious diners who want to taste the ethnic places that local love.

The menu is filled with dishes that were new to me. For example, lahmatzoun, the paper-thin small round pies typically topped with spicy ground meat, here come in the well-known version but also in another with spinach. The hatzapouri is an open-faced cheese and yogurt pie, which was very good. I loved the garlicky ground-walnut-filled eggplant rolls, which were so filling it seemed they had meat in them. The pickled cabbage dolmades filled with mixed beans came as two large rolls in a light tomato sauce. They were very good. So was the Armenian chicken salad, with mushrooms, pomegranate seeds and walnuts, dressed in a mayonnaise sauce. It was surprisingly light. The Armenian kebab, ground meat pressed around a long skewer, came with ample raw onions and chopped tomatoes and a generous portion of the very thin flatbread that also came in the beginning, with a spicy red pepper dip.

I don’t know if I would come back here to enjoy a lingering meal but I’d certainly order out because the food is real, homemade, delicious, and cheap. The Armenian wine we tried, Areni, wasn’t exactly the Caucasus Cabernet, as our enthusiastic waiter promised! Sip a beer instead.

Cuisine: tasty homemade Armenian dishes
Athens Area: northern suburbs
Decor: small family restaurant, bright and plain
Service: ok, the waiter was very enthusiastic!
Cava: ok
Prices: 12-15 euros per person
Address: 40, Irinis Ave., Pefki, tel.: 210-8064770, 210-6126823

Aglio, Olio & Peperoncino

2010-12-21T04:02:00.000-08:00

If your'e near the Acropolis and wise enough to steer clear of most of the area's tourist traps, then head to this cozy little Italian place that local Athenians love. The last time I visited this restaurant was with a good girlfriend many years ago. It had just opened, she had just gotten back from Italy, and we were both in the mood for a long talk over something easy, with good wine to match. The most recent visit was also with a good girlfriend, neither of us having just returned from pasta land, but dreaming about going.

Aglio, Olio & Peperoncino, right around the corner from the Acropolis train stop, is the perfect restaurant for the times: very reasonably priced, warm and cozy, just the right size, relatively quiet, with a menu that is mostly pasta and other favorite Italian fare. Why doesn’t anyone every get tired of eating Italian food?

The waitress is also the owner, a sweet, enthusiastic guide to the best things on the menu. The service was a tad slow. “Everything is made to order,” was the excuse. Everything we ordered was worth waiting for: An interesting bruschetta (grilled bread) topped with mozzarella, anchovies, tomatoes, oregano and olive oil, worked, despite what I thought might be disparate ingredients; the curly red lettuce salad with fresh mushrooms came embellished deliciously with pine nuts, raisins, parmesan and a tasty dressing; The spaghetti with olive oil, garlic and pepper was perfectly seasoned, a simple dish that speaks tomes about the good Mediterranean Diet, with just the right amount of heat to satisfy this spice-loving palate. My dining companion went for one of the specials, spaghetti like me but with a delicious sauce made with salt cod and tomatoes. Dessert was a choice of classics like tiramisu and crème brulee and more. We opted for a light, lovely lemon cream, the perfect end to an easy, comfortable dinner. Wines: the list is small and well-priced, with a handful of good Italian wines, too, including a Valpolicella and a Barbera d’Alba. We went with the restaurant’s own bottled Nemea, a classic red from the Peloponnese, which was just fine.

Cuisine: mostly pasta

Athens Area: downtown Athens (Acropolis metro station)

Décor: Cozy, a little dark

Service: Friendly but a little slow

Cava: Small but good

Prices: 25-35 euro a person

Would I come back: Si, si, si

Address: 13, Porinou str., Makrygianni, tel.: 2109211801

Varoulko

2010-11-17T06:12:00.000-08:00

Crisis time may not be the ideal season for visiting one of Greece’s finest and priciest restaurants, Varoulko, but a friend was taking me to dinner and offered to take me there. How could I say no? It had, indeed, been several years since I had savored the foods of one of my favorite chefs, Lefteris Lazarou.

Lazarou has stayed steady by Varoulko, the restaurant he began as a small, humble fish place in the boondocks of Piraeus and elevated to a temple of haute seafood cuisine, moving the restaurant once within Piraeus and then again during the Athens boom years to the Hotel Iridanos on Piraeus Street. Now, in addition to his role as chef, he has become the avuncular presence on one of this food season’s spate of food tv shows, Master Chef. The guests even try to emulate him in their own cooking “styles”.

TV has done him good, businesswise. On a Monday night, typically the toughest restaurant night in any city, Varoulko was packed and the crowd was decidedly casual, with more than a few 30-somethings in T-shirts. Is this the power of TV boosting business? I would think so.

The food, as always, was accomplished and refined and clearly portrayed a chef at the height of his technical skills. Some things worked better for me than others.

The first dish looked like a minimalist painting and paean to feminine-masculine balance: a neat straight row of overlapping slices of golden, fresh botargo on the left side of the dish countered the soft vanilla-cream sphere, roasted tomato bed and parmesan cracker on the right. Despite its beauty, for me the components seemed like mere neighbors with no real relation to one another.

The next dish though was redeeming and it was Absolute Lazarou at his Absolute Best: fish soup. Not just any fish soup but an intensely flavored dark reddish brown “essence” of the sea that came even more alive when you swirled a thin phyllo cigar into it and tasted the saffron cream in the bowl’s center. It was delicious and a siren’s call to his more sensual food of meals past.

Next came another great-to-look at dish that also had notes from the past but of a different order. Years ago, when the chef was cooking one summer near the marina in Piraeus, I sat in awe as he presented me with delicate strips of filleted sardine that had been adhered to a thin slice of bread and fried to perfection, all this served with eggplant cream. It’s a dish I’ve seen reverberate all over the city by others, but found it again on his current menu albeit “gourmet-ified.” Bream replaced the sardines, the eggplant cream stayed on, and the whole thing was tied together, sort of, with a raspberry sauce. It was great to look at but a little odd. I am not a great fan of confusing dessert flavors with savory flavors, but I know this is a trend now.

We loved the fish keftedes with Lazarou’s barbecue sauce, a fun, easy, comfortable dish that countered the austerity of some of the other plates.

Our meal ended with another redrawing of the boundaries between sweet and savory. Dessert. This was a delicious, smooth, richly flavored chocolate olive oil mousse with vanilla ice cream, served with a very salty cracker and an arugula leaf.

Maybe I just didn’t get it.

Cuisine: creative haute cuisine (fish and seafood) by a well-known chef
Athens Area: Athens neighborhood
Prices: 60-80 euros per person
Address: 80, Pireos str., tel.: 2105228400

Ta Tria Asteria (Three Stars)

2010-11-17T05:49:00.000-08:00

I had almost forgotten the pleasures of a good kebab—not something I, personally, indulge in too often—until a recent visit to one of Athens’ oldest (and best) kebab places, Ta Tria Asteria, reminded me of how delicious one could be. I remember first visiting this place, on Plastira square in Nea Smyrni, sometime around the mid 1980s. That a restaurant can change generational hands from parents to kids, renovate so that it looks young and fresh and modern, and yet serve forth the same high-quality food consistently well for more than two decades is a feat worth lauding. I can only think of a very few such restaurants in Athens.

No surprise then that the place was packed. Despite that, the service was excellent, so much so that, when we got lost after making a wrong turn in the area, they actually sent a kid on a motorbike to come and guide us to the restaurant.

The room is understated and contemporary, done up in beiges and woody browns, with pictures on the walls, a neutral design that somehow conveys warmth.

The menu is as large today as it was in 1986, a kind of who’s who of mezedes and kebabs with something for everyone. A waiter still brings out a large tray of meze offerings, appealing to both eye and belly.

We started with an excellent, very basic politiki melitzanosalata (eggplant salad) that was dense and smoky, with not a trace of bitterness and no seeds. Next, we sampled another eggplant dish: thick slices of fried eggplants, with skin, each piece so thick it was like a little cup. These were topped with what is described on the menu as ketchup. Could it be? Maybe. The sauce was very plain and basic and could have used some flavor. I liked the idea and the presentation. Next, we bit into triangular slices of lahmatzoun, thin pieces of baked pita topped with a dry, flavorful ground meat mixture. The lahmatzoun was very good, especially if you sprinkled it with some of the dried tomato flakes, raw onion and lime that are on the plate. A small plate of spicy red pepper and tomato salad came next, which was terrific.

I NEVER eat kokoretsi (skewered, grilled mixed innards) unless I have personally known the animal who gave away his innards for our pleasure. Here it’s a house special and I felt compelled to try it. No regrets. It was clean and as gentrified as kokoretsi can be. I did, however, save my favorite, the buttery, crisp pita kaisarias (pie with pastourma) that I remember as slightly larger from years ago, as the last of the mezedes. It was a tiny bit underbaked, but delicious.

We moved with full awareness of how many calories we’d already consumed onto the main course kebabs, opting for the kasserlit kebab, a long twist of ground meat and kasseri cheese wrapped around a skewer, grilled, then slipped off. This was garlicky and tangy and wonderful, especially with the standard side of raw onion and roasted tomato. The fine bulgur-tomato pilaf that comes with it is tasty.

Could we leave without cutting into a crisp round of shredded wheat pastry (kataifi) hiding a layer of mild cheese, sprinkled with pistachios and doused in an aromatic syrup? No way. I am talking about the kunefe, which I can still remember from 20 years ago because the first time I ever had it was at Tria Asteria. It’s even better today.

Three stars for The Three Stars! Bravo.

Cuisine: Some of the best kebabs in town and a whole array of politika specialties
Athens area: Nea Smyrni
Decor-Atmosphere: fresh and modern, warm and neutral
Service: excellent
Wine List: good
Prices: 20-30 euro per person
Address: 1, Melitos str. & 77 Plastira str., Nea Smyrni, tel.: 2109358134

The Prime Grill

2010-11-17T03:45:00.000-08:00

Dinner with my daughter, all of 17, is becoming increasingly more interesting. We actually set out for a new burger place in N. Psychiko, a northern suburb, but upon parking outside and looking in, we had little desire to go. Instead, we ended up across the street at the Prime Grill, on what has become a restaurant-heavy crossroads (Places include: Piperia, Far East, a good souvlaki place, the burger joint, within 100 meters of each other). I hadn’t been here in a few years and was glad to come back, for a decent steak and a pretty good burger.
   Prime Grill is one of many steak houses that opened in Athens when the country still felt like it was on an up-hill course, when meat, the de facto food of affluence, was on everyone’s mind! Greeks still lean toward the carnivorous, but maybe with slightly less frequency now that lentils have become part of the working-man’s weekly diet again.
   Prime Grill has a simple, accessible menu. We liked the sautéed mushrooms, which were light (translation: no cream!) and flavored with tomato and tarragon. They were cut chunky and cooked al dente. Other appetizers included the increasingly talagani, the popular, mild cheese from Messinia in the Peloponnese, which is best served grilled; grilled haloumi and vegetables; keftedakia (meatballs), and pretty good Greek fries, a little heavy on the salt but crunchy.
   I really was in the mood for a burger, a good representation of which is not the easiest thing to find in Athens. I ordered the barbecue burger (other options were the texas double, a pizza burger with tomato and parmesan, and the New York, with cheese and bacon). The bbq burger had bacon, too, lots of it, which definitely helped give the meat the necessary fat to make it juicy. (I removed it before eating, conscious of my diet, heart, and middle-aged middle.) The sauce was commercial bbq sauce, but the whole thing was just fine. My 17-year-old, whose appetite is impressive, managed to savor every last bite of veal chops (brizolakia apo moscharaki), which were cooked as she likes them, medium. (No one in this food critic’s family dares eat a well-done steak!) We shared a spinach-arugula salad, which was a little limp and very wet from too much dressing. The house red was quite nice. I refused to buy the kid a beer, though!
   All in all, we had a pretty good meal here, low-key, medium priced, and totally competent. The service was friendly and accommodating.

Cuisine: burgers and grilled meat
Athens area: northern suburbs
Decor-Atmosphere: simple
Service: friendly and accommodating
Prices: 25-35 euro a person
Address: 46, Adrianiou str., Neo Psychiko, tel. 2106753934

Polly Maggoo

2010-10-11T03:52:00.000-07:00

A small menu—15 items in total—that includes offbeat items such as liver, snails, trahana (pebbly pasta with a sour taste) and kavourma (spiced, preserved pork, beef or buffalo) is a sign that someone in the kitchen has a point of view and is willing to stand by it. Indeed, the kitchen master behind the stove at a relatively new, small, hip place in Metaxourgio, Polly Maggoo, is good at what he does: cooking up haute fare with flare and a sense of grounding.

Polly Maggoo is a not-so-classic French restaurant in a totally Greek neighborhood in the historic heart of downtown Athens. The décor is simple, almost bland, I’d say, but the food shines. If you are new to Athens, the area is worth discovering.

The best dish we had was the simplest: a plate of perfectly cooked al dente lentils in a tangy mustard vinaigrette that comes capped with a perfectly poached egg. The snails are of the French persuasion, shelled, that is, so you don’t have to hassle with them, and served in a tasty tomato-herb-garlic sauce. I learned something I didn’t know before about the charcuterie of Greece: that Drama produces pastrami, which here comes in thick, wide slices partnered with soft, warm goat’s cheese over a generous bowl of salad greens.

Main courses apparently were limited, as evinced by the fact that four out of six of us ordered the same plate, a beautifully prepared fresh cod fillet served with warm potatoes, capers, and parsley. Aioli, a kind of garlic mayonnaise, is served on the side. It was very good. The saffron-scented fish soup, not unlike a bouillabaisse, was also very good. I was tempted by the pennes with spicy kavourma, capers and cream but the summer’s lingering heat got to me and it seemed too warm for such indulgences.

Desserts we bypassed altogether, not for the lack of them but for the good of our waistlines. Would I come back to Polly Maggoo: O, yes, gladly.

Cuisine: French but simple
Athens Area: downtown Athens
Decor-Atmosphere: a little too minimal for moi
Service: a little slow, with just one waiter in the room
Wine List: good list with reasonable prices
Prices: 30-40 euro a person
Address: 80, Leonidou & Salaminos str., Metaxourgio, tel. 210 5241120

To Kalosorisma tou Antoni

2010-10-11T02:33:00.000-07:00

The prospect of savoring a goat-meat makaronada/pasta on a pleasantly chilly night sent me from the comforts of my apartment to the fringes of Kifissia, Athens' well-known northern suburb. Destination: a large, pleasingly busy (it was a Wednesday night) restaurant called to Kalosorisma tou Antoni, which, roughly translated, means "Antoni's Welcome." The building, at first sight, set me aback. It looked like an 'exohiko kentro' (sprawling, family taverna), the kind of place you take your inlaws on a Sunday afternoon or hold the reception for a christening. But the garden is alluring. It is filled with heavy, white, metal furniture, lots of greenery, and waiters from a slightly passe era. The service at this high-end taverna, which morphed from a longstanding humble place called Spyro's in Kypseli, a downtown neighborhood, into this northern suburb hot spot, was impeccable. Antoni, of course, was there, as gracious and friendly a host as could be, with the consummate outgoing personality of a good restaurateur.

The food was very good. No fancy fare here is to be found here, just straightforward home cooking with absolutely NO attitude. Our meal started with a simple medley of boiled vegetables, including runner beans, ambelofasoula in Greek, cooked as a cold salad with whole zucchini (a Greek summer classic). The portion was generous and nicely laid out on the platter. The dish needed a little salt, but so did most things we sample. I liked the homemade zucchini pie, the filling of which was more like a soufflé of zucchini and cheeses than a pure medley of veggies and herbs. I liked the idea that they have “palikaria” on the menu, an ancient dish of mixed beans and grains from Crete, which dates back to the ancient offerings of grains during harvest fests.

The main courses were very good, too. A generous, homey dish of that goat-meat makaronada consisted of a chunk of tender shank, meat falling deliciously off the bone, thick tube spaghetti and coarsely grated myzithra cheese, a common hard, whey cheese that Greeks use like parmesan. We loved it. The stifado (stew with whole small onions) of wild boar, hunted at the very civilized Farma Fotiades (Fotiades Farm) in N. Greece, was deceptively light, the onions cooked to perfect sweetness, still whole, and not too caramelized. The tomato sauce was a little lighter and looser than I like it to be in this classic Greek dish.

Dessert was on the house: excellent vyssino (sour) cherries strained for liqueur and spooned over mastiha ice cream and a dark, rich, unctuous, chocolate mousse. The watermelon, while sweet, was totally overpowered by them.

We would gladly enjoy another welcoming meal at Antoni’s.

Cuisine: Greek classics at their best (Greek Cuisine Award for 2009)Athens Area: northern suburbs
Decor-Atmosphere: nice decor, but the garden saves it all
Service: very good
Wine List: ok
Prices: A little steeper than I anticipated, at around 30-35 euro a person (with house wine)Address: 41, Georgiou Lyra str., Nea Kifissia, tel. 210 8017869 , 210 8018457

Ouzadiko

2010-10-11T02:08:00.000-07:00

With friends in town from overseas, we were out and about in the center of Athens, looking for an iconic Greek place for lunch. I had been to Ouzadiko but once since its founders, Stella and Takis, sold it two years ago, so I was curious to see how this standard bearer of excellent meze fare was holding up.

Ouzadiko is located in the atrium of the Lemos Center in Kolonaki. We got there a little early for lunch a la Grecque and the place was relatively quiet. Ouzadiko, for those who don't know it, is the hangout of upper-crust intelligentsia, Athens style.

The décor hasn’t changed since the takeover. Several tables were reserved but we found one easily. As the place filled up it was sort of comforting to see that this small classic place still attracted its usual array of Athens power brokers, from famous heads of newspapers to financial and lawyer types in need of some Greek home cooking.

The menu, like the décor, has remained almost exactly as it was under Stella’s rein. I always have a strange sense of foreboding in restaurants that “buy” the whole package, down to the recipes, and carry on someone else’s legacy. The only other place like that is Edodi, which I haven’t been to in years but was for a long time the carrier of another chef’s fame.

The torch at Ouzadiko flickers; I wouldn’t say that is shines as bright as it did when Stella oversaw the kitchen. The edge is missing.

For example, a simple greens salad, Mihalis’ salad, was dead on arrival, having left the kitchen with more than a few wilted and brown lettuce leaves, an indication that the attention to detail is lacking now. One of my favorite Ouzadiko classics, black eyed peas with greens, used to be an ode to Ladera (olive oil based dishes), deliciously textured, sweet, and soothing. The version we sampled was competent and maybe someone unfamiliar with the dish would not have noticed, but I found it bland and spiritless. The flatbread sticks of yore so delicious with Ouzadiko’s still good smokey eggplant salad, were soft and old.

We ordered a plate of grilled sardines, which were ok; the fried gavro (anchovies) were much better, crisp and fresh. So were the “orphaned” meatballs that my 9-year-old son approved of in the first bite. Still juicy and succulent after all these years. A grilled haloumi meze was exceedingly small in portion size.

Ouzadiko is still a popular place and the food is decent, maybe even better than many other Kolonaki haunts. But I still have vivid memories of exceptional meals here. The attention to detail seems somehow to have dulled. What about just trying a few dishes that are new and personal, and not just the watered down continuation of someone else’s legacy?

Cuisine: classics unchanged over time

Athens Area: center, Kolonaki
Decor-Atmosphere: buzzing power place still popular after all these years
Service: good

Wine List: ouzo and wines to satisfy a wide range of palates

Prices: 25-30 euros a person
Address: 25-29, Karneadou str. (Lemos center), tel. 210-7295484

P-Box

2010-10-08T04:45:00.000-07:00

P as in Peskias, or P after the Pi-shaped (Π) kitchen that is the main architectural element in chef Christoforos’ Peskias’ cool northern suburb restaurant? (He just opened a second P-Box in Kolonaki, as yet to be reviewed.
P Box indeed is very small, as its enigmatic name implies, but the flavors are big.

The best place to sit in the restaurant is around the kitchen on high stools (not made for a food lover’s derrier or a big, fat Greek one either!) where you get a pretty good view of what Peskias, one of Greece’s most celebrated chefs, is up to. The ergonomics are impressive in his little P-Box. Three people move around one another inside this tiny, visible kitchen, aware, of course, that it has, at all times, to look clean and neat. They move in harmony, dancing their own kitchen ballet each night, careful, literally, not to step on each other’s toes. A lot of the food is pre-cooked sous vide, a technique that Peskias has long been fond of and that serves him well here. One thing irked me a little: sous vide is food sealed in plastic bags and cooked long and slow in special ovens. A lot of what you see is the chef opening plastic bags and emptying contents into the skillets that occupy all of four small modern burners. (No flames flicker in P-Box’s kitchen.) But the plastic, lots of it, seemed counter-intuitive to me as a cook and consumer living in the age where such things seem more and more wasteful. Anyway, if the chef reads this he will probably assume the critic just needs something to say…

Mainly what I have to say is that the food is very good. How can a meal not promise to be excellent when the chef serves forth a heaping plate of spicy plate of beef hearts, sliced into strips and cooked to delicious intensity? Mr. P is a meat lover, as evinced in the quality of his jamon, which melts in the mouth without losing any of its aged nuance. He serves that with dice-sized little cubes of jelly made from Pedro Jimenez sherry and a dark, earthy cream of green apples. The “vromiko” (dirty in Greek) of the northern suburbs, the name of one dish, made me think of other things. What arrived was heart attack food of the most mischievous, delicious kind! A sausage cut up and cooked with greens and served with a whole soft-boiled egg in the center, just for fun. By watching a dozen of these leave the kitchen, I learned how to serve a soft boiled egg the Peskias way, by lobotomizing the top of the shell and pouring out the contents without breaking the yolk. It’s a popular dish. I adore the peinirli (dough boat) because it is poor man’s food dressed up for Sunday. Peskias’ is crunchy and buttery and filled with a superlative dose of foie gras and siglino (cured pork) (again, a double dose of heart attack food, just in case some of us meat lovers didn’t have enough!) Wow was that good.

The Cypriot ravioli filled with haloumi cheese come served in a delicate chicken broth, which is the best part of the dish. I wanted to try the other two pasta dishes, especially the pennes with gorgonzola, Limnos Muscat, pepper and lemon. With great difficulty I refrained. The eight main courses are nicely balanced: two pork dishes, two chicken dishes, tuna, grouper, shrimp and a vegetarian specialty that I plan to try next time: prasoselino me avgolemono (leeks and celery with egg-lemon sauce and pan-fried manouri cheese). It sounded so unusual.

The desserts were extremely good. I have a weakness for meringues. But P-Box’s, which is so clean and architectural and flavorful, is one of the best around. The cream inside is a coconut flavored pastry cream. Strawberries layered between it and the stiff meringues give it the brush stroke of irresistibility. The chocolate tart is pure heroin for this chocolate addict.

Peskias is in his element here. His humor comes out as he chats with guests and does his chef’s dance in the kitchen, preparing the food he loves. Clearly he seems to be enjoying himself and we his food. It’s a win-win situation!

p.s. The sommelier is excellent and the wine collection impressive. Oddly, P-Box aspires to be a kind off hybrid Greco-Spanish tapas bar; lovers of Spanish wines will find much to sip here.

Cuisine: modern
Athens Area: northern suburbsDecor-Atmosphere: small as a box, Π-shaped, with a visible kitchenService: good
Wine List: very good, Spanish wine collection impressive, excellent sommelierPrices: 40-50 euros a person
Address: 11, Levidou str., Kifissia, tel. 210-8088818

To Mageriko tis Nagias

2010-10-08T00:48:00.000-07:00

Nagia doesn’t accept kids and closes the kitchen at 10.30, despite her Ikarian DNA. (Ikaria, for those who don't know, is the Aegean island where time stops and most people live at night.) “When Ikarians show up, you know, late, I say, hey, look, let’s go somewhere. I am done in the kitchen.”

I discovered this tiny taverna on a side street in Kallithea, about a 10-minute taxi ride from downtown Athens, thanks to a friend (not from Ikaria) who passed along the word from another friend who had just been there. It’s not completely unknown or even completely unpublicized, but it does have the distinct feel of a place off the radar screen despite the fact that the food here is delicious. The décor is very personal, a reflection of Nagia, who loves her space and takes pride in the character she exudes. I might describe it as filled with old photos and the patina of age, despite its three meager years on the Athens restaurant map, but it is filled with spirit that words can’t capture. There are about five tables in the whole 50-m square restaurant. The size of the space and the even tiner kitchen don't seem to make one dent in the consciousness of either the cook, her helper, the musicians who play here on occasion, or the crowd, a mix of intellectual types who seem to know what good food is all about. Damn good food, I’d say. Nagia is the perfect “crisis” restaurant, just right for these times. It brims unapologetically with all the values whose loss we are currently mourning: honesty, value for money and, good, solid Greek food that happens to be very, very flavorful and original. Nagia serves forth Greek cuisine that is traditional in its approach but is also the result of a learned hand who knows just what’s right. My grandmother cooked soupies (cuttlefish), for example, but they were nothing like Nagia’s, which are patiently simmered with capers, green olives, and tomatoes and are absolutely down to earth and heavenly at the same time.

The menu consists of a large array of standards, such as feta ladorigani (with olive oil and oregano), horiatiki (village salad), meltizanosalata (eggplant salad), haloumi cheese on the grill, revithia sifneika (chick peas from Sifnos), which were thick and soothing and tres delicious, pork tigania (in a skillet) with mushrooms and mustard and more.

We loved the pitakia (small pita bread) with goat’s cheese, honey and sesame. The stamnangathi (spiny chicory) salad was exceedingly fresh. She boils it as for horta (greens) and doesn’t serve it as a raw salad. One of my favorite dishes is the hilopites (pasta) with caramelized onions and xinomyzithra cheese, a take on an intoxicating pasta dish from the islands of Kassos and Karpathos, but with Nagia’s touch. I think the most delicious and regal dishes on this unique menu of classics and personalized tradition is the kritharaki (orzo) with smoked eel and fennel. It was such a sympatiko combination of flavors, at once very unusual and very soothing.

There wasn’t room to try more. But dessert did fit. In this case a cheese cake (Nagia’s own), with a dried fruit compote.

Cuisine: delicious home cooked Greek food with a personal flair
Athens Area: Kallithea
Decor-Atmosphere: a koutouki to calm us in the crisis
Service: friendly
Wine List: Tsipouro, ouzo, xyma krasi (house wine) and two organic wines, plus beers
Prices: 20 euro a person
Address: Evaggelistrias str. & 1, Galatias str., Kallithea, tel. 210 9517230

Nagia’s is the 21^st century reincarnation of a great koutouki. And for all of the above, and more, our check came to 20 euros each.

O Kipos tis Edem

2010-10-07T01:31:00.000-07:00

Sometimes eating out for a living spawns the need for some plain old comfort food, the need to revert to much-loved restaurant dishes and familiar environs. I couldn’t think of a more apropos place to head for a meal to bridge the seasons and comfort my end-of-summer blues than the aptly named Kipos tis Edem (Garden of Eden) in Halandri, one of the most accessible and happening suburbs of Athens. If only the kipo (garden) part were a little more Eden like, this place would be so much better!

Nonetheless, this longstanding Lebanese restaurant serves all the classics from one of the Middle East’s most delicious cuisines and does so while proffering a water pipe for whoever wants to partake. Don't misunderstand: this is not a hookah bar! The décor speaks Arabic, too, in classic, of slightly heavy, shades of red, artisanal plates, copper briks and the like.

I come here for the things I have grown to like, from kiounefe (the cheese-filled kataifi-shredded wheat-pastry), to hummus served warm and topped with pine nuts. I can eat mountains of that, it’s so soothing. The Armenian salad is like our own horiatiki (village salad), but with a hot chili pepper added to it. The taboule is lively with the flavor of fresh chopped parsley and in-season tomatoes. I love the Arabic eggplant salad, with tahini, and the falafel, chick pea fritters, also served with tahini sauce (not as good as the ones I crave when on the go near Omonia, at Fat Boy, but just fine nonetheless). The stuffed grape leaves are not like our plump ones, but longer and thinner and lemony, and the tzatziki-like labne, a yogurt dip in other words, is a little runnier than what we Greeks are familiar with. The kibbe, meatballs in a bulgur crust, are crunchy and tasty but a little on the heavy side. The oil? Maybe it was the heat or maybe the desire to just eat less meat, but we stayed away from most carnivorous offerings, such as the various cooked lamb dishes and kebabs. There was still plenty to sate even the most diehard vegetarian, and plenty more for all you meat lovers out there who have yet to see the light!

Kipos to Edem is one of the oldest Lebanese places in Athens, still maintaining standards after all these years. That’s a good thing.

Cuisine: Lebanese
Athens Area: northern suburbs
Decor-Atmosphere: classic Arabic, on the slightly heavy side
Service: good
Wine List: good
Prices: 25-30 euros a person
Address: 9, Konstantinou Paleologou str., Sidera Halandriou, tel. 210-6853580, 2106826105

Oinothira

2010-10-07T01:12:00.000-07:00

Determining which restaurants one likes and doesn’t isn’t an exact science. Food, service, the glamour element (or lack thereof), atmosphere, decor and what I call the comfort zone—how good you feel in a place at a given moment in time and how easy it is to experience the same feeling upon subsequent visits—are all factors that go into the liking or not of a place in which we perform one of our most personal, fundamental activities, eating, of course.

I like a place called Oinothira, which is just a neighborhood taverna in a small, hidden plateia (square) behind a church off Eth. Makariou and Hrissostomou Smirnis streets in Kaisariani. We visited on a Monday night, and, with a slap in the face to the crisis, Oinothira was packed. Good sign. I like this place for two main reasons: it is quintessentially Athenian and it serves forth some very good fish and an excellent linguine with clams and garlic, the aromas of which waft straight to whatever part of our brains makes us instantly hungry.

The spinach-shrimp salad was decidedly elegant for such a low-key neighborhood place. Our roasted eggplant salad with red peppers and scallions was lovely. All the usual taverna suspects are on the menu, from fava (yellow split peas), skordalia (garlic dip), boiled seasonal vegetable salad, and tyrokafteri (spicy feta spread) to cheese fritters and bekri meze (pork with peppers and wine). A few stand out, among them: the feta-stuffed peppers on the grill and the seafood and bulgur appetizer fragrant with basil and lemon. I loved the simple but well-prepared grilled sardines but more than anything else I lapped up a filling plate of bavette with vongole (tiny clams) that was very good.

This is crisis food at its best with prices (around 15-20 euro a person) that obviously bring people out of the house on a hot Monday night. One caveat: Don't expect even the remotest air of glamour here; this place is just a down-and-dirty neighborhood taverna.

Cuisine: comfort food at its best
Athens Area: close to the center
Decor-Atmosphere: neighborhood taverna
Service: good
Wine List: ok
Prices: 15-20 euros a person
Address: 13, Ethn. Makariou str. & Hrissost. Smirnis, Kaissariani square, tel. 210-7258428

Alsoupoli, Y Gonia ton Gefseon

2010-10-06T04:59:00.000-07:00

A place that serves haute cuisine at taverna prices is always welcome, especially in these tough times, even if that means taking your passport and heading north across the border of Nea Ionia into the wilds of Alsoupoli. Fear not. It's just a 20-25-minute cab ride that won't cost more than 10 euro. Awaiting you there is Stathi, the chef-owner of Alsoupoli Y Gonia ton Gefseon, who holds court among a steady flow of devoted fans who come for the array of delicious fish carpaccios (salmon, gavro/anchovies among others, marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, a rainbow of peppers and more.) I loved his white taramosalata (fish roe salad), which looks a little like Rossiki (russian salad) thanks to the creaminess and the shredded carrots he adds. A seafood-vegetable pie was absolutely delicious, with a variety of greens that lent a sweetness that worked beautifully with the sweetness of the shrimp and other seafood.

The chef has a way of working with seafood and starch which hits notes of near perfection. My favorite dish was a dark, delicious mound of orzo, the color of amber, topped with a few shrimp. The orzo had absorbed all the briny esssence of the seafood and approached that deeply satisfying place the Japanese call umami. Another favorite was a molded dollop of wild and regular rice served on a shiny black plate, sprinkled with paprika like stardust. It was the most beautifully presented plate. A truffle risotto came out a little on the salty side and somewhat out of sync with everything else, but it was tasty. Two pieces of baked fagri/sea bream arrived a little while later, cooked perfectly and very fresh.

Stathi, in a starched black uniform and soldier’s posture, checks the tables of his diners regularly. He suggests dinner options even though there is a pretty large menu to chose from. His fish comes from a few key places around the Aegean, not least of which is my home island, Ikaria.

Alsoupoli cannot make any claim to aesthetic prowess. The «design» is about as simple as it gets, a sparse garden that’s lean and spare, clean, orderly, and neutral. This place is totally about the food without fanfare, a welcome return to solid values in an era that desperately needs them. That’s not to say that a few frivolous treats aren’t on hand, like the delicious balsamic-marinated strawberries with black pepper and a bottle or two of Moscato D’Asti.

Cuisine: haute without the fanfare

Athens Area: northern suburbs
Decor-Atmosphere: simple, neutral
Service: good
Wine List: good
Prices: 25-30 euro a person with wine

Address: 28 Messinias & Dodecanissou str., Alsoupoli, tel. 210-2777065

PicNic Bar, Multi Ethnic Grill, Food & Swing

2010-10-06T04:38:00.000-07:00

What happens when an experienced bar owner, who happens to be, like moi, from the island of Ikaria, opens a small place with a friendly name and pretty good food on a quiet plateia (square) in Erythrea? A core of Kariotes and their vast network of mojito-loving friends, not to mention more than a few neighborhood locals, turn an otherwise sleepy plateia into a lively late-night scene.

PicNic Bar is more than a bar. The Food & Swing in the title refer to a full menu of treats with a decided Eastern flair. The music is perfect for folks my age (whose memories of youthful vices are still intact). The food is exactly on target for these times: inexpensive but hardly boring. Thai, Indian and Middle Eastern fragrances perfume most dishes. A Tandoori oven is the piece de la resistance in the kitchen, from which emerge fresh breads a la minute (naan) and a coral-colored Tandoori chicken that is very good. The chef, Mihalis Boskos, spent a decade in London, where he learned to love and cook many of the cuisines of Asia.

We sampled a very good hummus; generous and very tasty ground meat kebabs; chicken with Thai peanut sauce (sate), and various dishes with yogurt, which inspired me to rethink its many uses in the kitchen. The couscous and beets both have hints of orange.

Most starters and salads are in the 4-5 euro range and most main courses around 7-8 euros.

But it’s the energy I liked most here: relaxed but hip. Just what’s needed to awaken a quiet plateia (square) when most party animals head to the over crowded coast or crowded downtown Kifissia, which is nearby. Even the Greek Prime Minister is said to be a customer here.

Design: PicNic Bar is no high-tech mixologist’s court, but rather a comfortable, small place with a few Eastern brush strokes meant for folks who just want to enjoy that age-old pastime: sipping a drink with some friends and sharing a few plates of very decent, inexpensive food. Simple pleasures for complicated times.

Cuisine: multi-ethnic
Athens Area: northern suburbs
Decor-Atmosphere: Eastern pot-pourri, simple and comfortable
Service: good
Wine List: Full bar with cocktails between 7 & 9 euro plus full wine list
Prices: 18-22 euros
Address: 1, Nikolaou Plastira str., Nea Erythrea, tel. 210 8077501

Sushi Bar

2010-10-06T03:52:00.000-07:00

On a hot summer night, too lazy to make my way to the sea around this city, I head to the next best thing. That, for me, is the Sushi Bar, specifically in Neo Psychico, a northern suburb that happens to be near home.

The Sushi Bar has been around for years and while it’s not the crème de la crème of sushi in Athens, there is always something new and unusual on the menu. The place is busy, which is always a good sign in any restaurant that serves fish, for the faster they sell it, the fresher it is. Service is good and friendly and the selection includes something for everyone, from all-time classic combo plates to more fusion sushi that marries a world of influences in every bite.

I love the spicy tsipoura (snapper) ceviche: paper thin slices of farmed snapper in a hot, perky marinade. One of my favorite dishes is the maguro shogi, a mix of raw and cooked tuna, in yet another spicy sauce. The seared tuna “Nagao” with jalapeno pepper and coriander is a great example of the fusion of flavors that make the food on this globalized menu work. The salmon tartar puts a Japanese spin on the Scandinavian classic gravlax.

I always order a salad here and my favorite is the Nori, with seafood. The vegetarian rolls that I tried this time around were so light and summery. Try the cucumber, pineapple and mint or the asparagus-avocado-mint trio. The selection of other, more classic but also creative maki, is large enough to please a wide palette of tastes. The Mediterranean roll, another fusion fantasia, with tuna, sea bass, scallions, avocado and cucumber will cool off anyone on those sweltering Athens nights. Mayo, pineapples, herbs, jalapenos, and more from around the world come into focus in the rolls and other menu items at the Sushi Bar, making it fun to nibble here. But my all-time favorite nibble is the Dragon Eel, with smoked eel, avocado, and the restaurant’s “special” sauce.

A few Kirins or Saporos to wash all these nibbles down, and even the searing city summer nights seem cooler.

Cuisine: sushi classics and sushi fantasiasAthens Area: northern suburbsDecor-Atmosphere: modern
Service: good and friendlyWine list: enough of a selection for all tastes, including saki and Japanese beers
Prices: 30-45 euros
Rating: ***
Address: 38, Georgiou Vlahou str., Neo Psyhiko, tel. 210-67 29 333

La Cantina

2010-10-06T03:43:00.000-07:00

I can’t think of the last time I spent a night in a Kolonaki restaurant where the most expensive dish on the menu was 15 euro. Signs of the times are pointing to a reshuffling of the restaurant order. This is surely the year that all things haute will deflate like a failed soufflé and most things cheap and chic will attract hipsters between the ages of 20 and 70 who know a good deal when they taste one.

La Cantina, on the upper level of the Lemos Center, is a perfect example of such a place. The restaurant specializes in pizza (which is pretty good, on a cracker like crust), pasta (we tried the casarecce with eggplant, tomato, pecorino, and basil—a little underseasoned believe it or not, but better than most), more than a handful of salads and a few iconic Italian desserts. The setting is simple. A bar on one side of the floor serves dinner, too, but on tres uncomfortable seats and small tables; the restaurant seating is fine, the décor amicable and Kolonaki-rustic, with garlands of sun-dried vegetables and cinnamon sticks dangling as if from the rafters of someone’s Tuscan larder. The service is slow.

Try the bufala pizza or any of the other 9 choices, including a classic margarita and a lovely pie topped with fresh arugula and anchovies. The arugula salad with gorgonzola dolce and walnuts is tasty but a little over dressed. We opted for a salami turco for dessert, otherwise known as kormos, which came dressed to kill in a generous dousing of confectioner’s sugar. It was very chocolaty and very good, nothing like the stuff I mix together in haste at my kids’ birthday parties!

La Cantina is casual, sexy, simple and cheap. A meal for two, with half a carafe of house wine cost us 43 euro.

Cuisine: Italian, specializes in pizza
Athens Area: Kolonaki, downtown Athens (metro Panepistimiou or Syntagma)
Decor-Atmosphere: simple setting, amicable and rustic
Service: slow
Wine list: ok
Prices: 20-30 euros
Address: 28-30, Alopekis str., Kolonaki, tel. 2107299133

Kuzina

2010-10-06T02:18:00.000-07:00

Aris Tsanaklides is one of the best-known chefs in town and his talents extend to several restaurants, from the Pasteria chain to Pasaji, a meze-tapas restaurant behind the Grande Bretagne Hotel, to Kuzina. The latter is one of my favorite places both to take foreign friends and also to enjoy a night out over smart mezedes. It also happens to be one of the best places in town to people-watch, if you sit outside.

The restaurant is light and airy, decked out in whites and one of the first of a recent crop (over the last five years or so, that is) to be designed to remind one of a bakaliko (grocer's shop). Shelves are lined with jars of house-cured vegetables, spoon sweets etc., the kitchen is open and the best table inside is the long one that is located right in front of chef Tsanaklides’ burners.

On a recent visit, he had just changed the menu for the spring-summer.

I loved the stuffed vegetables “bougiournti” filled with spicy feta and apaki, the Cretan smoked pork. This is not a diet dish to be sure, dripping with salty melted cheese. It’s great with a glass of ouzo.

I like Tsanaklides’ approach to Greek meze traditions, which is to alter them just enough to add some playfulness without going too far. His Horiatiki (village salad) is a classic example: the only thing he does differently is to add chunks of Salonika Kouloura (bread ring from Salonika). The sweetness of the bread ring and the nuttiness of the sesame blend beautifully with the salad and provide…instant papara! Other classics such as fava are classics here with little intervention.

A menu signature is Kuzina's Agioritiki melitzanosalata (eggplant salad inspired from Mount Athos ), an open-faced, dramatically presented dish that looks and tastes great.

Tsanaklides has lived and worked in the Caribbean and Pacific Rim, and calls upon his years in Hawaii and elsewhere to inspire him when it comes to fish and seafood recipes. His pickled octopus, cut sushi-like, and served over a carpaccio of fennel bulb has the lightness of a dish one might be served on the deck of a pedigree yacht. The octopus loses its dense earthy feel and is transformed into something much finer. The pairing of this favorite Greek sea creature with fennel is not new, but Tsanaklides presentation is pleasingly fresh. His home cured lakerda (salted tunny), called by the very non-Greek sounding Hamachi, is also delicious.

The sea beckons but the land sates. So it goes that my personal favorite are his Greek sausage rolls, made with ground lamb and seasoned with sumac. He serves these spicy little knobs with a tangy yogurt sauce. Even on a hot spring day, it hit the right spot.
Caveat: Sometimes the food is uneven. I've ordered many of these same dishes on various occasions and while most times they're very good, there have also been a few misses.

Cuisine: Greek meze traditions with a playful twist
Athens Area: center, view at Thissio and Acropolis (metro Monastiraki/train Thissio)
Decor-Atmosphere: light, airy, white touches, reminds of a bakaliko
Service: good
Wine List: good
Prices: 30-40 euros
Address: 9, Adrianou str., Thissio, tel. 2103240133

Thalassinos

2010-05-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

Thalassinos is well-known fish and seafood taverna in Tzitzifies, behind the Onassis Heart Hospital. Its been the darling of gourmandes in this town for a little more than two decades. Prices here have remained steady over the past few years, but fish and seafood are dear. Nonetheless, for the quality of the raw ingredients and the friendly, accommodating service, I have always felt that Thalassinos is a good deal. Lately, though, I’ve seen a slight downturn in what the kitchen prepares. I don’t know if it’s a phase. I recall better meals here, where the zeitgeist was utter simplicity. Some of the dishes we sampled on a recent visit were a bit muddled. Nonetheless, what is always the piece de resistance here is fresh shell fish and the all-Greek fish, grilled and super fresh. Other recommended dishes include: plump medium-sized Greek sardines, cooked up Salonika style, on the grill and sprinkled with raw onion and boukovo (hot pepper flakes), perfectly prepared; roasted chunky eggplant salad, with specks of green pepper and tomatoes; a potato-smoked herring salad with chopped carrots; rice and octopus salad, with a briny aftertaste that makes it perfect for ouzo; spanakorizo (spinach rice pilaf) mixed with bits of shrimp and raisins, served with a drizzling of saffron-orange sauce; seafood dolmades stuffed with rice, raisins, pine nuts and a medley of chopped seafood. Dessert is simple at Thalassinos: signature chocolate soufflé and shredded wheat pastry (kataifi) filled with cheese and topped with mastiha-favored ice cream are the best things to order. Cuisine: all the fruits of the sea. Famous fish taverna, with imaginative strokes and great ingredients. Decor: cozy and comfortable, bright room with less clutter and a summery lightness, beige walls, shutters and woodwork a seafoam green.Service: Excellent.Wine list: Excellent. house wine, Greek wines, beer, ouzo.Prices: 35-50 euro per person.Address: Irakleous and 32, Lysikratous str., Tzitzifies, Tel: 210-9404518

Vinoterra Resto & Cava

2010-05-14T05:36:00.000-07:00

It was one of those nights when reviewing a restaurant seemed a lot more like a chore than a pleasure. Our choice for the evening was either a new pasta place on Panormou or a wine-bar on Marinou Antypa in Herakleion. I live north and didn't want to stray too far from home. Wine Bar it was, and so we discovered to our pleasant surprise a place with good food, a laid back atmosphere, a happening bar filled with civilized people sipping bulbous glasses of wine, and decent prices. Vinoterra.

The space is simple and modern. A glass panel in the front of the restaurant makes it feel almost like a cafeteria or café and less like a restaurant and the modern but neutral furnishings bring it close to nondescript. The design could have more character. It falls into that category of cosmopolitan bland.

I liked the small menu. That’s almost always a sign that the kitchen is careful, has thought things through and decided upon a few offerings that are done well. That is certainly the case here. One thing that needs improvement is the timing, not only between courses but also between the wine service and food service. Our first plate had arrived but the sommelier, who was knowledgeable and accommodating, had not yet come to the table to take our order. Then, wanting a second glass of an Aivali Nemea (a red from the Peloponnese), which I had never tried, we had to practically flag him down from across the room.

The first thing that came to the table was our salad, a delicious medley of escarole, endive, hazelnuts and chestnuts. This might sound ironic, but salads are often one of the worst things in a Greek restaurant, something literally tossed together, drenched in dressing, and pushed out of the kitchen. Not this one. It was made with care, beautifully balanced, and delicious.

My reviewer’s heart pushed me to try something that went against all my culinary instincts, a risotto with sour cream. But the waiter assured us it was really good, and I trusted him. My instincts were wrong (not about the waiter but about the dish). It was, indeed, very good. Surprisingly so. He mixed the dollop of sour cream into the vegetable risotto at our table, then served it—a delicious, creamy, lusciously tart but comforting dish of pillowy risotto. What a nice change from the porcini-studded, truffle-oil-drizzled, goop that comes out of more kitchens than I care to remember. This was a high starch night. Our next dish was a ragout of beef, broccoli and pecorino, woven among the slurpy pieces of gaganelli pasta, something like the twisted Cretan schioufichta pasta, if that means anything to more traditional Greeks. It was very tasty. I wish there had been more cheese in the plate. But we lapped it up like hungry children, finding it hard to resist almost any pasta dish.

A more serious dish of sea bass (lavraki) over selinoriza (celery root) purée was also lovely. The lavraki “blackened” had a sweet edge to it, and the selinoriza purée with saffron sauce acted as a lovely foil.

We sipped away at various wines by the glass, and mulled over dessert, which was an orange tart with chocolate ice cream. I liked the intense flavor of the orange and that combo—chocolate and orange—is one of my favorites.

Someone in that kitchen can cook!

Cuisine: Small and elegant, with Mediterranean touches
Athens Area: Herakleion
Decor-Atmosphere: Modern, sleek, a little impersonal, but with a happening bar scene made for civilized adults
Service: A little disorganized and a little slow, but accommodating and polite
Wine List: Excellent (The restaurant is actually part of the cava next door)
Prices: 25 -30 euro a person without wine
Address: 74-76 Marinou Antypa str., Neo Herakleion, tel.: 210-2792100

Armolia

2010-05-14T04:05:00.000-07:00

A new fish meze place about five minutes from my house is always a welcome thought and the Halandri square, where Armolia is located, has become a hot and happening restaurant scene over the last 2 years.

Armolia is designed to look like an old bakaliko (grocery). This is a trend, not only in places around the square but in general around town, the answer, maybe, to our need for familiarity, comfort and the air of economy. How expensive can a neighborhood grocery store be, in other words?

Armolia falls into the category of places that have opened in droves these last two years, places where someone thought through the design a bit and yet still serve familiar food. You won't find foams, gels, or hunger-inducing hauteur here. The food is simple and most of what we had was quite competent, each plate with its own little twist. People seemed to be having a good time all around us, sipping their ouzaki or house wine and finding some relief from the stress of the daily news.

I liked the beet salad with walnuts, a filling, nicely portioned dish with a vegetable I adore. Trying to keep my silhouette from exploding, I stayed away from dishes like the baked potato with cheese but did go for the fries with grated kefalograviera cheese, which are excellent, thin, crisp and tasty, the way a sinful, starchy fry should be. The mushrooms in a skillet with wine (pleurotus mushrooms to be exact) were lovely. The sauce is tasty and pleasantly winey, but the touch that makes this dish is the strips of pita bread that are crisped (fried?) and added to the otherwise soft mushrooms in a nice contrasting note. The fried zucchini don’t work for me here. Too thin and too soggy and nearly burnt. Neither did the walnut skordalia that I ordered in the side. This needed punch (and salt).

There is a whole range of fish and seafood mezedes and main course to choose from, including all the classics on the gill, several saganakia, steamed shellfish of varying type etc. I was pleasantly surprised with the stuffed kalamari (squid), a dish I usually don’t like. Here it is filled with a tangy bulgur mixture. The squid was nicely cooked and the pan sauces just right for bread. The octopus with mavrodafni wine is a dish I have tried in several better versions around town. What was missing here was the raison d’être for the sweet wine—if you don’t let it cook down a little and turn somewhat syrupy the dish is ordinary. Basically it’s a classic stifado with sweet wine instead of dry. Never one to reject a melted cheese dish, I did try the grilled Chios Mastello – I forgot to mention that the cuisine of Chios plays prominently in various dishes. It was nice, finished with a tangy tomato sauce.

Halandri is getting ever more crowded with cozy little places like Armolia that offer decent value for money, an outing that is affordable, food with a little twist that isn’t totally over the top, and a comfortable, well-appointed room that people feel good sitting in. Have they reinvented the wheel? No? Are these the times for such reinventions? Probably not. So, sip that ouzo and enjoy a decent meze before we all default…

Cuisine: pleasant, light, styled like an old bakaliko

Athens Area: Halandri, northern suburbs

Decor-Atmosphere: pleasant, light, styled like an old bakaliko (grocery store)

Service: helpful and accommodating even in the Friday night rush

Wine List: OK

Prices: 25-35 per person

Address: Central Halandri Square, tel.: 210-6856279

Dal Professore

2010-05-14T03:36:00.000-07:00

I wanted comfort food. It had been a stressful week. The idea of a soothing glass of red wine, a bowl of steaming pasta, some garlicky concoction from our Italian neighbors and the company of a good friend led us to a place I had been hearing about and had actually visited a few years ago: Dal Professore.

This Italian trattoria is situated in an old house in Maroussi, pretty much in the commercial heart of Athens' overcrowded northern suburb. When I had gone a few years back the meal was less than I had hoped for. But a different chef and the unabridged praise of more than a few trusted food friends led me back there. Unfortunately for a second time I was less than thrilled.

It was as much an attitude problem as a food issue. Our waiter was extremely difficult to understand and when we asked for details he seemed annoyed. It had been raining all week, so when he said that the seafood is always fresh I asked him how that could be when the weather has been so bad that fishermen don't go out. OK, maybe that was an unfair or a loaded question, one in which a food critic goes looking for trouble, but he responded nastily and that set me on guard.

We had the Romana salad, which is described as red radicchio, which led me to imagine the deliciously bitter real Italian radicchio that I love so much. Instead it was a simple lettuce salad with a very heavy, creamy dressing. We ordered it without the grilled chicken. When the bill came, I couldn't tell if we were charged the full amount or not for it.

A pizza marguerita, described as topped with tomato sauce, mozzarella, parmesan and basil came out without the basil, which I had imagined as velvety soft leaves perfuming this classic. It was ok, even basil-less. But the waiter insisted it was “In the sauce,”. A Vitello tonnato, one of my favorite Italian antipasti, made of paper-thin slices of beef carpaccio and creamy tuna sauce fell flat on this tongue, with none of the perkiness such a contradiction of flavors and ingredients is supposed to bring.

Then came our main course. The waiter had tempted us with a gnocchi special, on a night when the restaurant was occupied by us and three other tables. When we decided to order it he said it had already been taken. It was a one-order special? Hmmm….We opted for another classic, homemade tagliatelle with sausage stew and saffron. The stew was hardly a stew, but rather a dry gathering of decent sausage slices hiding among the folds of pasta. As for the saffron, we assume it was hiding out somewhere with the basil. It was hard to taste.

Dessert: The classics here, too. We went for the amaretto panna cotta, which was, indeed, redolent of bitter almond, which I love, but was a bit dense and stodgy from an oversupply of gelatin.

Have I come down hard? Maybe. Each review is the reflection of an experience. What can I say? I just described mine.

Cuisine: Trattoria classics

Athens Area: Maroussi, northern suburb

Decor-Atmosphere: Cozy old house

Service: Snotty and borderline rude

Wine List: Sympatico

Prices: 35-45 euro a person

Address: 47 Dionyssou & Hatziantoniou str., Maroussi, tel.: 210-6149000

Bakalogatos

2010-05-14T03:09:00.000-07:00

How is that some restaurants manage to serve very good food in very pleasant surroundings for very good prices, while others, often times serving similar fare just don’t understand that value for money is where it’s at these days. Bakalogatos ("The Grocery Cat"), a quaint little restaurant in multi-ethnic Kypseli, right on the central drag of Fokionos Negri, definitely falls into the first category. One recent visit with a small group of friends left us filled to the core on delicious, Kassos-island-inspired home cooking but hardly empty in the pocket. The bill came to about 20 euro for each of us and we ate very well.

Getting to Fokionos by car and parking in the neighborhood could be a bit of an issue, but an extra 8 or 10 euros handed over to one of the nearby garages still makes this place a great value. Alternatively, you can walk from the Victoria train station.

The place is designed casually and the energy is light and happy. The contemporary country look is filled with whites in various shades. Despite the small room, it seems spacious.

The menu is organized in an unusual way: Apo to Bakaliko (From the Grocer’s), Saganakia, Tiganies, Patates (Potatoes), Kassos specials, mezedakia se piatakia (meze plates), salads and vegetable dishes, pilafs, pasata, and chef’s suggestions are the categories one has to choose from. There is always one traditional Greek savory pie as a daily special.

One of the most memorable dishes were the excellent and surprisingly juicy keftedes (meatballs), a simple dish granted, and maybe one that’s hard to get excited by, especially for us jaded restaurant critics, but these were unique in that they were juicy and crisp all at once. The tiny, bite-sized Kassos dolmades, filled with a ground meat and rice mixture, were delicious. We liked the grilled, mild Chios mastelo cheese, a simple meze nicely presented and generously portioned. Some dishes were more artful than others, among them a napoleon-like fried eggplant dish in which layers of crisp-skinned eggplant were interspersed with a dollop of katiki cheese. The eggplants with yogurt lacked that Anatolian excessiveness, but they were good. A plate of roasted oregano-flavored potatoes were tasty but a little cold; The fries, though, were excellent. I loved the good-quality sausages on the grill, too. One of the night’s real winners, by far, though, was the giouvetsi with shrimp. The flavor was rich and round, the shrimp fresh and deliciously briny with a waft of the sea still evident. I have to contrast this dish with one for which I had high expectations but was somewhat let down: the Kassiotikes makarounes. This is a local dish that, when made well, is an irresistible play of opposites: sweet caramelized onions, sour sitaka yogurt-like cheese, and sating homemade pasta. Here the dish was dull. It was the only thing I found wanting on the menu.

There is a lot more to choose from at Bakalogatos, from classic Greek regional pasta dishes and pilafs, to a large array of starters and the chef’s suggestions, of course, which include pork with thyme and limes (moscholemona), pork loin with porcinis and red wine, and another pork loin on the grill, cooked with tomato, manouri cheese and arugula.

These sound like definite reasons to return to this cute little place that gets the recipe right: very good food, nice environs, affordable prices.

Cuisine: Very good Greek regional classics, with an emphasis on Kassos cuisine

Athens Area: Kypseli

Decor-Atmosphere: Cozy and casual

Service: Friendly

Wine List: Limited but acceptable

Prices: Just right for these dire times – about 15-20 euro per person

Address: 72, Fokionos Negri str., Kypseli, tel. 210 821 6598

Cilentio

2010-02-02T03:10:00.000-08:00

I embraced this quaint little restaurant on Mantzarou Street in downtown Athens when I visited it a year or so ago, liking the homey, cozy feel of the space and the artful but down-to-earth cuisine. A recent visit, however, left me with a less enamored feeling.

We sat downstairs, in what essentially is the imiypogio (semi-basement), which was partly my fault for making a reservation at about 7 p.m. on a Saturday night. The space, while cozy thanks to a warming, working fireplace, is cramped, so cramped that five of us could not sit facing one another round the table, but rather in a Pi (Π) formation, because the only other table downstairs was too close for chairs to sit back to back. I felt a little like a bridesmaid in a wedding party!

Cilentio’s menu is a potpourri of Mediterranean and Greek dishes, with items like bresaola pouches, carpaccio (sooo last decade!!), grilled vegetables, and more making up the bulk of appetizers. A lot of Greek-Med combinations of flavors define the menu, in dishes like katiki cheese-jamon Serrano-Zucchini tart (an appetizer) and greens salad with grapes and manouri cheese. Other items are more hybrid—rooster stuffed with graviera cheese, spinach and bacon, salmon-broccoli “crumble”, black cod with Greek fava (split pea purée) are a few such examples. Some things are silly and out of place, like the 95 euro Wagyu fillet with Port sauce and truffled mashed potatoes. I wonder how many orders of this come in a night. This is a plate that belongs to fatter times, when people spent money with less hesitation.

Every meal starts here with a warm bowl of velouté. Ours was a base of celery, drizzled with olive oil. It had all the right soothing elements. A spinach-haloumi (cheese) salad was tasty and generously portioned. I liked the sweet and savory combination of flavors in those bresaola pouches, which come served with fig jam.

Main courses were pretty good. I ordered the duck, a weakness of mine when the mercury drops, as it had that night. It was a little over cooked for medium rare, as I had ordered it, and was tougher than I like it. On a scale of one to 10 I’d probably give it a seven. The wine sauce was tasty. Friends ordered the black cod with fava and wild mushroom sauce. The fish was nicely prepared. This dish is well composed and nicely presented. A rib-eye marinated in olive oil and seasoned with Himalayan salt (Messolonghi or Greek island seas salt isn’t tasty enough??) was competent.

I wasn’t thrilled with the desserts, which seemed a tad pretentious, especially the “modern” cheesecake, which was a cave-like mound of white cheese (cream cheese and whipped cream?) whose center was blood-red with a compote of berries. It looked like the sculpture of a small volcano rather than a soothing dessert. The coffee mousse with caramel foam, fried chocolate bits and cookies was ok, a little self-conscious and obviously anxious to impress.

I remember a better meal here the last time around. Maybe the key is to keep things just a little simpler.

Cuisine: Mediterranean and international pot-pourri

Athens Area: Downtown Athens

Decor-Atmosphere: Cozy, warm, low-key

Service: Good

Wine List: Good

Prices: 30-35 euro a person without wine

Address: 3 Mantzarou str. & 54, Solonos str. (paved walkway), Kolonaki

Tel.: 210-3633144

Gefseis me Onomasia Proelefsis

2010-02-02T03:06:00.000-08:00

I hadn’t been up to Kifissia to catch up with chef Nena Ismirnoglou at Gefseis in close to two years. One recent visit on a Friday night made me angry at myself for not being hungry enough to savor more of this lovely restaurant’s delicious food. Nena, gourmet earth mother, takes the comforting flavors and dishes of Greek cuisine and brings them to an almost ethereal level. Hers is a female approach—to nourish, warm the soul, and provide delicious flavors in every dish; what a great welcome for the intellectual approach to Greek food that took over this city for a while.

This chef loves chips. And she made us love her versions of high-end beet chips (served beautifully with a silky dollop of Santorini fava) and classic potato chips, served artfully over a mound of grilled calamari strips and smoky eggplant cream. The beets retained a surprising flavor and the fava (split pea purée), garnished with volvous (bulbs) and roasted olives, was delicious. I loved the contrast between the chewy but tender calamari and the thin crisp potato chips in the second dish.

The winter cabbage salad at Gefseis brings an otherwise pedestrian cold-weather dish to new heights. Shredded cabbage and celery root are tossed with soft bits of the sweetest red pumpkin and countered with the subtle sharpness of green olive-bergamot confit. There is a pinch of boukovo (hot pepper flakes) somewhere in the dressing that magically holds the whole thing together. It’s one of the nicest salads I’ve sampled in a while, not too wet, perfectly balanced, pleasantly acidic.

We had a warming fish soup, a touch sharp with acid, but filled with chunks of cooked langoustine. The soup is tomato-based and is an elegant rendition of the classic Greek island fish soup.

So far so good. Light, healthy fare. Then came the peinirli (dough boat). I’ve never met a peinirli I didn’t like, but one that is mignon, dripping with butter, billowing with melted feta, and dotted with avgotaraho (botargo) is just impossible to resist. I loved it.

My favorite dish was the one I almost didn’t have room to eat, a perfectly prepared seared tuna in mavrodafni sauce. I wish I had had the stamina and space to savor a few other of Gefseis specialties, such as the turkey “like stifado” and the politico pilafi that accompanies Nena’s juicy keftedes (meatballs). The goat cooked in bitter orange sauce with mashed-potato galaktoboureko sounds like something to order next time, too!!

Cuisine: New Greek classics by Nena Ismirnoglou

Athens Area: Northern suburbs

Decor-Atmosphere: Civilized and pleasant. A great old house filled with tasteful antiques that I could live in forever

Service: Very good

Wine List: Very good

Prices: 45-60 euro a person

Address: 317 Kifissias ave., Kifissia

Tel.: 210-8001402

Athiri

2010-02-02T02:36:00.000-08:00

We visited Athiri on a pre-holiday night, when the weather was uncannily balmy and the anger over a smoking ban no one is enforcing hot (at least to me). That said, I was delighted to see that Athiri, a small restaurant for which abiding by the antismoking regulations must have cost a chunk of cash (building a separate glass-enclosed, well-ventilated room), was totally legal! The room is in the garden, quasi attached to the rest of the restaurant, with a view of the door leading to the kitchen.

Greece is the bad boy of Europe when it comes to enforcing the smoking ban. Restaurateurs egregiously dismiss it and use the economic crisis as a crutch. Enough said. What most of us are concerned with are the food, service, ambience, etc. Athiri gets lots of brownie points in all those areas, since chef owner Alexandros Kardassis is one of the most talented young Greek cooks around.

Athiri is pricier than I had expected at about 50 euro a person. There is a definite artfulness to everything presented here and some things appear on the plate with a delicacy that belies their rustic roots or hearty, robust flavors. The fava (split pea purée) is a prime example, gorgeously plated with slivers of silvery anchovies and strips of red pepper waiting to be mixed into the velvety purée. The taramosalata (carp roe salad) with skate (salahi) is a plate worth photographing, so beautiful and refined in its appearance, so delicate in flavor. The dill oil marries it all together like silk thread on a fine cloth. We loved the giant beans with herbs and mushrooms and especially loved the fact that the kitchen was willing to serve them forth without the kavourmas (cured beef, like confit) that’s listed on the menu (one of us in the group was a vegetarian). The trahana was another winner, with crabmeat, chives and another flavored oil, this one bright green with parsley.

The main courses were not as strong. The scorpion fish (skorpina) risotto with lime and ginger seemed to have a slight identity problem, cool with the lime and ginger but lacking in the comforting tones of a more traditional Italian risotto. I ordered the marinated duck leg crusted with figs and served with apple salad, which was very tasty, rustic, but also elegant. The lamb leg sous vide in thyme sauce was tender but not as exciting as I anticipated.

Desserts are a delicious blur! Well, not really. The three flavors of crème brûlée, a restaurant signature, is as tasty as ever, with caramel, Greek coffee, and orange cardamom options. The kormos (chocolate ‘trunk’) is what every child dreams of at the age of 50…

I like Athiri. For all the compliments, though, I couldn’t help but feel that the restaurant had somehow plateaued—reached a certain level and is a little bit stuck there. Maybe it’s time to spend a season away behind the stoves near one of Europe’s or America’s many masters, to renew the spirit and give a jolt of freshness to a menu that has changed a little too cautiously, if at all, since this lovely restaurant opened its doors a couple of years ago.

Cuisine: New Greek cooking by Alexandros Kardassis and his able team

Athens Area: Kerameikos (metro station)

Decor-Atmosphere: lovely old house off Piraios Street, the kind that makes urban life…livable

Service: Competent and attentive

Wine List: Good

Prices: A little steep for these times, at around 50 euro a person

Address: 15, Plataion str., Kerameikos

Tel.: 210-3462983

Arcadiani - Oi nostimies ton giagiadon

2010-02-02T02:12:00.000-08:00

A weekend in the Peloponnese might include many things, from visits to the wineries of Nemea and Mandineia and elsewhere, a tour of the archeological wonders, a stop in Nafplion, to a jaunt down to the Mani or a stroll through one of the region’s beautifully preserved villages, like Levidi, Stemnitsa, and Dimitsana. The one thing it should definitely include, at least from the perspective of a self-respecting food lover, is a drive up the winding road to the village of Psari in Arcadia, where Makis Papoulias has put together a small but impressive workshop where local women produce some of the best spoon sweets I have tasted, local pasta products, and some delicious desserts, including the very local karydokourambiedes (walnut Easter cookies). He is an ardent collector of antique cookery books and other home kitchen tools and the small but well-organized museum is a walk through time. But even more impressive than the sight of a few women scraping off the peels of bergamots, grapefruits, and oranges to make the workshop’s famed sweets (that’s what they were in the midst of doing when we arrived), is the restaurant that Papoulias has organized in the space. I had one of the best meals in recent memory in this lovely untouristed village, real home cooking made from obviously top-notch, fresh ingredients, with nothing on the table that was out of season.

Our simple meal—prepared by a couple of local women who work at the facility—started with a basket of home-made bread. Good sign. Next came a delicious tyrosalata, a creamy blend of feta, yogurt, diced green peppers and parsley. A plate of mapa (cabbage) with local sausages puts to shame the best wurst and sauerkraut concoctions. This was sweet from slow-cooked cabbage and tangy from the orange-flavored local sausages. One of my favorite regional dishes in all of Greece is the black-eyed peas and greens of the Peloponnese. Slowly cooked, as comforting as a down cover, healthy, and unsparing on the olive oil, which gives it its final, soft texture. Here, this dish was divine. We feasted on other small plates to start with, too. One of the best was the dark, grainy skordalia (garlic purée), made with both bread and walnuts. We sampled Arcadiani’s own homemade singlino, which is nothing like the stuff we find cryovacked in supermarket refrigerators. This was a piece of pork tenderloin that had been cured. It was sweet instead of numbingly salty. Excellent. A home-made squash pie was also excellent: light, flavorful, just the right thickness.

Why would a Greek lunch stop here? The main courses were yet to come! These included a soul-warming plate of straggistes (strained) hilopites (egg noodles) for our vegetarian companion and an absolutely delicious country braised lamb dish served with hilopites in tomato sauce. The lamb literally fell off the bone.

We drank a modest amount of Ktima Spyropoulos, thinking of the drive back, and we feasted on excellent yogurt topped with bergamot spoon sweets, and a heaping plate of sugar-dusted karydokourambiedes, which were spiced with cloves and gave me just the right sugar kick to have the energy to walk around the village afterwards. It was all worth it.

Cuisine: Regional dishes made with care and absolutely delicious

Area: in the Peloponnese

Decor-Atmosphere: Country comforts in a gorgeous setting with a view stretching all the way to Megalopolis

Service: Friendly

Wine List: Local, mainly Ktima Spyropoulos

Prices: 15-25 euro per person

Address: Psari Trikolonon Gortynias, Arcadia

Tel.: 27910-27161/27162

Ep' Avli

2010-02-02T01:37:00.000-08:00

So we’re all on the lookout for pleasant places to eat on a Saturday night (or any other night for that matter) that won’t cost us an arm and a leg, especially as the country teeters on the verge of bankruptcy and international humiliation. If there is a view of the Acropolis to remind us of glories past, all the better. If the food is more than edible, we’ve got a winner on our hands. In the case of Ep’ Avli, a convivial taverna in the heart of Metz, all of the above criteria are met.

When the weather is warm enough to sit outside the rooftop view is soul – sating. The food is simple and simpatico, the prices right. In winter, though, when there is no view but the rooms themselves and the faces of your company across the table, it’s actually hard to see them. Why? Because the smoke is thicker than the fog on a hot July day. It makes me burn with fury that Greeks just can’t abide by the law. It pisses me off even more that restaurant operators have no qualms about giving you some stupid story excusing themselves from what is very clear: It is illegal to smoke indoors in public spaces. Illegal, got it? I just created the one-woman smoke police and I will out the abusers in this space!

Now onto the reason most of you read this column: to eat here or not to eat here.

Ep’ Avli, which is housed in a great old house and is simply appointed with plain rooms of pale yellow decorated with a collection of black-and-white plates, offers up a menu of Greek taverna classics for prices in tune with our ever-shrinking buying power. The fava (yellow split pea puree) is of the chunky not velvety variety, and tasty, with a touch too much salt. It comes topped with capers and parsley. The taverna litmus test for me is melitzanosalata (eggplant salad), which here comes right out of the fridge, cold but velvety and pleasing smoky despite the chill. We sampled the pumpkin fritters, shaped oblong and a little over-fried (dark brown), but not bad. I liked the tigania (fried pork) with retsina. The wine was subtle, the meat tender, the whole dish flavorful as a good meze should be. We weren’t charmed by the eggplant imam or by the dolmades, both of which came with wiggles of yogurt edesma piped over the top in an attempt at plate design. Better to keep it simple in my humble opinion. The dolmades have a filling of rice, onions, and dill. They were competent, but nothing stellar. Ditto on the stuffed eggplant, whose flavor was clouded by the pillowy pile of yogurt on top. Obsessed and angry at the smoke, I somehow missed this place’s claim to fame, a baked feta dish, which I hear is good.

Desserts were pretty standard: a nest of kataifi filled with scoops of mastiha ice cream and topped with vyssino (sour cherry), and a chocolate brownie-like cake with a heavy dose of syrup. There was something less than homemade about them. Again, given the simple environs and the taverna air, a straightforward dessert like great homespun halva might work better here.

Cuisine: Classic taverna fare

Athens Area: near the center

Decor-Atmosphere: cigarette smoke clouds the simple rooms in this old, neoclassic house

Service: Friendly, competent

Wine List: Xyma only, although the owner did come to our table and say he could “get us a bottle” if we really wanted one

Prices: 15-20 euro per person

Address: 14 Arhimidous str., Pangkrati

Tel.: 210-7014836

Matsuhisa Athens (Nobu)

2010-02-02T00:48:00.000-08:00

I don’t know if it’s against the current spirit of the times to write about places that are, well, très cher. On the other hand, most of the recent meals I have had in restaurants that are more pedestrian, spruced up tavernas, really, are getting tired. The menu in most of these joints is pretty much the same with a few personal “twists”: fava (split pea purée), fries, soutzoukakia, maybe a pita of the day, some salads with nams that usually promise a lot more than they deliver, etc. Then there is Matsuhisa. It was amazingly crowded on a recent Friday night, absolutely delicious.

I had refrained from going, mainly because I feared that I’d like it too much!

The space is not quite what I had anticipated. Nicely appointed in lively browns, Matsuhisa stakes no claim to zen calm. The decor is busy and the place bustling and noisy. The wait staff does an excellent job of initiating customers into the world of Nobu Matsuhisa’s empire, by explaining specials that are specials in every restaurant, by suggesting the complex tasting menus for two, by suggesting dishes for novices and more experienced palates alike.

We started with a fabulous plate of “new” sashimi, tongue-sized pieces of very tender salmon that had been flash seared and served forth in a delicious sweet sauce swirled with another sauce made of what I think was smoked eel. The presentation is stunning. The tuna in jalapeno sauce was less spicy than I had hoped and the tuna marinated to the point of being thoroughly cooked. It was very good. The blackened cod, a house special in Nobu restaurants all over the world, was arguably the best piece of fresh cod I have ever had. It was perfectly cooked, seared and crusted with a sweet sauce, and served with an artful pencil-like piece of pink pickled ginger. The fish flaked off like a puffs of cumulus clouds, so light and tender and just delicious. The rolls were very good, but rolls are rolls, even the special Matsuhisa roll with several different kinds of fish and a sprinkling of crunchy roe. For me, one of the great dishes of the night was neither sushi, sashimi, or fish at all, but an unlikely, extremely simple, delicate, and earthy wedge of cabbage! Yes, cabbage, cooked in the wood-burning oven that stands tall as soon as you walk in and peer into the open kitchen. It as dressed with a few flakes of black truffle and a drizzling of truffle oil. It needed a little salt, at least for my palate, but it was absolutely surprising and original and the kind of thing I am inclined to try, granted in a more pedestrian version, in my own kitchen. The fresh salad with tuna slices was delicate and tender and the sauce amazing: a concoction of finely chopped onions and sesame oil that united the entire plate.

Desserts were to die for here, too. The chocolate bento box came with a piece of dense chocolate ganache cake and a side of green tea ice cream. They played off each other beautifully, the deep, dark, overwhelming power of the chocolate tempered by the cool aloofness of the ice cream. We also loved the espresso mousse in a shot glass with Suntori whiskey foam.

Matsuhisa was fabulous, totally outrageously priced, but the kind of meal that you remember well past the next morning. And, hey, it’s the holidays. We indulged...

Cuisine: Contemporary, artful Japanese fusion

Athens Area: Southern suburbs, near the sea

Decor-Atmosphere: Zen with a happening buzz

Service: Very professional and informed

Wine List: Excellent wine list and sake list

Prices: Close your eyes and take out the plastic (120+ euro per person)

Address: Astir Palace Hotel, 40 Apollonos str., Vouliagmeni

Tel.: 210-8960510

O Naftis

2010-01-29T03:07:00.000-08:00

I can think of better names for a fish restaurant than "O Naftis" (The Sailor) and I can certainly name a dozen places with more pleasant design than O Naftis, in Halandri, but despite some of the drawbacks the food here, while simple and straightforward, was surprisingly good.

O Naftis is housed on the ground floor of an existing restaurant, Manteio, right on Palaiologou, the main street. It is a little confusing. When you walk in you aren’t quite sure what restaurant you are walking into but you do notice right away the colors of the sea and the motifs of a ship in the back. That’s O Naftis. Wooden floors, maritime paraphernalia right down to the bousoula, and paintings of sea life, boats, etc. attempt to create a certain atmosphere. Rolled up sails divide the seating areas. The tables are colored in Aegean-blue tablecloths and the chairs are upholstered in white. The place is cramped with lots of furniture. By the looks of it, O Naftis doesn’t quite seem like a great port of call.

On the other hand, we had a very good meal here. A gilt-head bream (tsipoura) ran 60 euros a kilo and was wild and grilled perfectly, tender, juicy, delicious. A homemade taramosalata with white tarama (carp roe) was delicious, looser than the usual stodgy stucco that is more potato or bread than fish eggs that one finds in so many seafood places. We tried a dish of tiny fried squid, which were perfectly fried, too, not at all greasy, crisp, well-seasoned and tasty. The grilled mussels had a lovely texture and the pan juices that they rested on were very good. There are some other, rare, offerings that we didn’t sample, including the king crabs (vasiliko kavouri) and a host of shellfish, among them razor clams (petrosolines). The rest of the menu includes a classic array of Greek fish and seafood cookery, especially as it’s represented in tavernas: shrimps fried, grilled, and cooked as saganaki; mussels saganaki; anchovies (gavros) both marinated and fried; and various seafood-themed salads. Main courses besides whole fresh fish include lobster and shrimp pasta. We ordered a wintry boiled vegetable salad and relished the flavor of this humble place’s excellent olive oil, “from somewhere in the Peloponnese,” as the owner cryptically said.

This is a place for groups of friends who want an old-fashioned taverna, before the age when designers set the tone for restaurants, where the food is simple, straightforward and good.

Cuisine: classic fish and seafood taverna with an excellent hand at the grill

Athens Area: northern suburbs

Decor-Atmosphere: pre-design age room like the tavernas of a generation ago

Service: friendly and accomodating

Wine List: limited but competent

Prices: 35-55 euro a person

Address: 15A, Konstantinou Palaiologou str., Halandri

Telephone: 210-6810570

Dosirak

2010-01-29T02:17:00.000-08:00

Dosirak

I thought I had exhausted the Asian restaurants in the vicinity of Syntagma, mainly as a frequent customer at Furin Kazan and the noodle shop diagonally up the street on Apollonos street. But Dosirak, while it hadn’t quite escaped me, was not on my radar screen until my friend E mentioned it was her new favorite sushi place. Dosirak is not run by Japanese, but by Koreans, who also have a tradition of sushi. It’s a family restaurant and the family’s daughter, born and raised here, speaks perfect Greek. On a Thursday night, the place was busy. On a Friday night, the waitress had to turn away group after group. This place is popular among a certain set—hip Greeks without very deep pockets, hip foreigners, and Asians. We had a very good meal.

Dosirak is simply but pleasantly appointed. Paper lanterns protrude from holes in the ceiling in an attractive, comforting way, casting a warm glow over the lean room. A few touches of wood and black make up the basic design elements, lending a clean, uncluttered air to the place. The kitchen is visible, busy, but not intrusive on the rest of the space. The tables are spaced well apart despite the small room.

Korean specialties like kimchi (a kind of vegetable) and excellent barbecue are among the signatures on this menu. We tried the Korean bulgogi, a savory mixture of thinly sliced beef and onions. The dish is not much to look at but the onions give it a pleasant sweetness. The seaweed salad is really a mixed green salad with a little seaweed, in the form of thinly shredded, tasty strands, added to it. It’s fine—a little underseasoned that night. There is a fairly large noodle selection and some unusual meat specialties, among which is a duck teriyaki (skewers of duck) and a Korean fried pork called Tonkatsu. I wanted something light and went for the sashimi, large platter, with 21 pieces, much of it tuna and salmon. It was fresh and tender but could possibly have been a touch colder. The royal crunch maki, which my friend shamelessly indulged in, is a large roll of rice and seafood with a sesame-seaweed ring that holds the whole thing together.

Dosirak is a restaurant that speaks tomes about how this city has changed. Just up the street is one of the most traditional Greek tavernas and just about the only place worth eating Greek food in the environs of Plaka. But this particular corner of Voulis and Apollonos have become a kind of little Asia, with a grocer and a few restaurants all within a minute’s walk of one another.

Cuisine: Korean specialties, Sushi and other Asian dishes.

Athens area: Syntagma

Decor-Atmosphere: Simple, lean, pleasant.

Service: Good

Wine List: Competent for a place that is out of the Greek loop. Try the beers instead.

Prices: 25-35 euro per person

Address: 33, Voulis str., Syntagma

Telephone: 210-3233330, 210-3233396

Bacaro

2009-11-06T06:14:00.000-08:00

Bacaro

Boy was it a night to remember. We had gone to see the award-winning “future of Greek cinema,” Kynodontas (Dogtooth), after reading more than a few amazing reviews. We left the theatre really pissed off, in a really bad mood, feeling as though we had just spent two hours inside the disturbed, deranged mind of someone in desperate need of some serious psychotherapy. (That said, the film left a dent in my conscience; it is memorable and highly original). We needed a little fun. The bars on Christou Lada str. were already packed—maybe with earlier movie-goers in need of some alcohol to relieve—pun intended—something worse than a toothache. We headed to Bacaro, in a stoa off Sofokleous Street and readied ourselves for a party.

Bacaro is an unusual place. It’s situated both inside the stoa and inside a regular space. There is live music on the weekends. The band that night was impressive. A Nigerian singer rapped in perfect Greek and bounced around to the well-honed rhythms of the jazz-funk group. We drank and ate and drank and ate in a conscious effort to fix our collective mood.

The food at Bacaro is pretty good! The starters are all artfully presented and tasty. Even simple dishes such as the small pita wedges with tomato, grilled haloumi cheese and basil purée looked pretty and tasted good. A napoleon of grilled vegetables and manouri cheese was balanced and robust, with a balsamic dressing. The savory loukoumades (dough fritters) filled with cheese and dressed with honey and sesame were delicious, a definite advance on the cheese croquette theme that was once part of every menu in town.

I liked the Caesar’s salad, despite the fact that it wasn’t quite authentic. The anchovies were, if not absent completely, then very hard to see or taste. The bacon added a tangy note in their place. Other salads included an arugula and cherry tomato mélange, with sliced olives, grilled haloumi, and sun-dried tomato vinaigrette; spinach and carrot salad with mushrooms, sesame, prosciutto and honey vinaigrette; and a mixed winter salad with oranges, gorgonzola, hazelnuts and berry vinaigrette.

The linguine with vegetables, thyme, roasted tomatoes and manouri was very nice. Other pasta and risotto selections included penne with salmon and saffron, an interpretation of carbonara with bacon, mushrooms, zucchini and tarragon, and a risotto with marinated zucchini, dry vermouth and thyme.

Main courses included grilled chicken with honey-mustard sauce, beef fillet with wine sauce, pork loin stuffed with smoked metsovone cheese and eggplant purée, and a cheese burger.

We didn’t try the main courses, but with all that we did eat we drank a delicious bottle of Refosco, then another, and another. Numbed to the pain of an aching Dogtooth, we swayed to the music and enjoyed the rest of the night.

Cuisine: Mediterranean grazing food, perfect for the venue

Athens Area: Athens downtown

Decor-Atmosphere: Easy, casual fun in a great little downtown restaurant-cabaret

Service: Professional

Prices: 30-40 euro per person, with wine

Address: Sofokleous 1, Athens center

Telephone: 210- 3211882

Pantos Kairou

2009-11-06T05:30:00.000-08:00

My sister had been telling me about this little place for ages. She spends half the year here in Greece, a good part of it in Piraeus, and she is on a constant search for the holes in the wall with good home cooking so she doesn’t have to do it herself. Pantos Kairou, which more or less translates as “For Every Season,” is a small, modern meze restaurant in the heart of Piraeus, diagonally across the street from the Demotiko Theatro (the huge old public theatre that is now undergoing renovation). It’s on a small pedestrian path. The main dining area is done up in pale shades of yellow, peach and beige, with warm lighting and a pared down contemporary look, almost Swedish modern. The look belies the totally authentic, classic, very well-executed Greek cuisine that comes out of the kitchen. The only giveaway that there is something comfortingly old-fashioned about this place is the collection of antique toy cars and vespas on the shelves, which occupied my eight-year-old son’s interest for most of our lovely meal. I saw lots of women back there and one guy the Sunday afternoon we went. This might sound sexist, but I could tell there was a woman’s hand preparing some of the food we tried. Lunch started with a delicious plate of grilled, marinated pleurotus mushrooms that were meaty without being tough. The fava (yellow split pea purée) was one of the best I’ve ever had. The yellow split peas were puréed to a soft, velvety texture, drizzled with a little green extra-virgin olive oil, and served forth in a compartmentalized plate, so that garnishes—raw red onion, capers, and green olives—were separate. You spooned what you liked on top of your own portion. The arugula salad was less democratic. This came already dressed—a little overdressed—in a strong balsamic dressing with long strips of parmesan and clumps of soft myzithra cheese tossed into the salad. It was a little too acidic. One of the things I always hanker after in tavernas and small meze places is one of the things I rarely cook at home: batter-fried salt cod and skordalia (garlic dip). At Pantos Kairou, the cod was perfect. It had been desalted to just the right degree and was juicy, so that you got both the crunch of a perfectly fried batter crust and a tender piece of fish inside. The skordalia was mild, smooth, and made with potatoes. A litmus test for me when I eat in tavernas is the bifteki (a Greek burger). The one here is tender and tasty. The only dish I did not like were the fries, another test for any kitchen. I think these were precut, judging from their size and shape. That’s not so much the issue—they were soft and soggy and underseasoned. Dessert is on the house: an old-fashioned piece of kormos—that’s Greek for trunk, as in tree trunk, as in a sweet made of broken up biscuits, butter, and chocolate, shaped into a log and cut into thin marbled pieces. It came doused in commercial chocolate sauce. It would have been better naked!
We had a couple carafes of the house red and white wines and, most importantly, satisfied my sister’s desire to have a home cooked meal—just not in her own home! Would I come back here again? Yes…

Cuisine: Traditional Greek cooking

Athens Area: Center of Piraeus

Decor-Atmosphere: Simple, modern
Service: Homey
Prices: 15-20 euro a person

Address: Ag. Konstantinou 5, Demotiko Theatro, Pireaus

Telephone: 210-4220222

Oikeio

2009-10-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

In one week’s time I had the experience of dining on traditional cuisine revisited (Milton’s in the Plaka) and on traditional cuisine more or less the way our parents and grandparents know it, at Oikeio in Kolonaki. Expecting to fall in love with the fashionista version of Greek cooking, I found myself instead liking the comforts of well-known dishes simply prepared and served forth in a hip, obviously popular place right in the heart of the city. Oikeio has been going strong for a few years now, luring in the young jet set from Kolonaki and beyond with what could be aptly described as Greek soul food. Oikeio means familiar, and that's exactly what is serves forth: the familiar Greek food that makes up the repertoire of classic fare.

Indeed, the menu is a manifesto—literally—about what food means in Greek culture, with quotes by Kazantzakis, a brief history of bread, rice, olive oil, spoon sweets, wine, and more. It’s like a newspetter, in fact, with an article on food in the movies and on books of note. Too much to read while having dinner, especially in extremely crowded quarters where you can barely spread your elbows or fit the bread basket on the table, so I took it home…

Oikeio is like an over-filled house of nostalgic objects, put together like organized chaos, all of which somehow works. It is crowded and the tables are too close together—they seated three of us at a table upstairs that barely fit one. But the food is simple and good, just what it promises to be. The prices are right, too, especially surprising given the high-rent location on the corner of Ploutarchou Street.

Homemade savory pies, various salads (small portions), grilled brizoles, chicken breasts, biftekia, and a slew of daily specials make up the menu. We tried the coiled yogurt pie, the filling of which was a combination of yogurt and cheese. This is the kind of dish that’s easy to like even if it’s not superb—dough, cheese, fat, the trio that attracts most of the human race. The boiled vegetable salad was a surprisingly small portion, with zucchini, carrots and a few other things cut coin-size. It was so small we ended up ordering another salad, too, the Oikeio, with spinach, celery, tomatoes and haloumi. That came in a small portion, too. I ordered that day’s fish special—anchovies (gavros) in the oven with coriander. I liked it even though I was hoping to see fresh coriander and not the seeds. But it was fine, exactly the kind of thing that might come out of someone’s home oven on a weekday night. The octopus with short pasta was also homey and, well, oikeio. The tsipoura filet was less successful. It came wrapped in grape leaves but looked very tired when it arrived. The flavor was ok. The bulgur salad that accompanied it was good.

I liked Oikeio but think I’d like it even more for lunch when it is a little less crowded and noisy. Is it a sign of the times that on a Tuesday night it was mobbed?

Cuisine: Classic Greek home cooking

Athens Area: Kolonaki

Decor-Atmosphere: Like being in someone's living room

Service: Harried but friendly

Prices: 25 euro a person

Address: Ploutarhou 15

Telephone: 210 72 59 216

Cine...Gefseis

2009-10-16T07:20:00.000-07:00

One Friday night, I thought it would be fun to take a friend who’s in the film business up to the place called Cine…Gefseis. I don’t know exactly what I imagined—a place whose menu comes from meals we’ve seen in movies? A place with old Greek movies playing in the background, loops of dining and cooking scenes? Was it a novel concept, like the dinner theater called Rouf Train, which is something of a food cult experience in Athenian dining circles?

Cine…Gefseis is in the main square of Kefalari. It turns out that just a few months ago, this restaurant was something else, different name, different concept, one to which the chef Yiannis Baxevanis had lent his name and menu ideas (MoMo). That apparently didn’t work and so a face lift ensued.

The long, deep space is modern and neutral in design. No great transportive feeling like the one you get from watching a good movie, takes you over here. Instead, it’s very well-lighted. I felt the way I sometimes feel when I walk into a small Greek clothing store with the salesperson hovering nearby, watching your every move. The names of each item come from movies of Greek cinema glory days. Stella fyge, kratao…("Stella, Get Out of the Way, I'm Holding a Knife") for example, is a boiled vegetable salad. The kitrina gantia ("Yellow GLoves") is fava (Greek yellow split pea puree). Mia Italida ap’ tin Kypseli ("An Italian Girl from Kypseli") is grilled vegetables. That's about the extent of the movie industry's influence on the menu.

The titles might be humorous to a Greek who knows them, but the food is boring in every language. A salad of fresh greens, dried fruit, and pear vinaigrette was drenched in dressing and busy. The grilled talagani cheese, a new cheese from the Peloponnese, was hard to mess up: a disk of cheese slapped on the grill. OK. H Kori mou y Socialistria ("My Daugher the Socialist") is a plate filled with small Cretan greens pies (hortopitakia) and these were ok but far from homemade. A braised lamb dish seasoned with rosemary and Mavrodafne wine sounded promising but disappointed because the flavors were bland.

So, Cine…Gefseis is hardly a show worth watching. Whoever is directing this performance doesn’t have a clear idea of what he wants to do. The plot's not interesting. If menu items are the cast in a restaurant, then the actors need rehearsing—better delivery is badly needed.

Cuisine: Greek
Athens Area: Northern suburbs, Kifissia
Decor-Atmosphere: Neutral modern
Service: Fine
Wine List: Small, mainly Greek, with some Italian labels
Prices: 35-40 euro a person
Address: 37, Kolokotroni str., Kefalari, Kifissia, tel. 2106234074

Noor

2009-10-16T07:13:00.000-07:00

I loved the wallpaper! Vivid scenes of the Taj Mahal in all the reds, yellows, and oranges of

India

adorn one entire wall at Noor, a small, odd little restaurant in Metaxourgeio, a gritty neighborhood in downtown Athens. Indian (or Pakistani?) television shows aired on two flat-screen TVs overhead. As we dined on vindaloo, subcontinent dancers bobbed and wiggled to the flow of Indian pop music, with partners who would make Tom Jones proud. Noor, which means light in English, is one of a number of “authentic” Indian-Pakistani restaurants in a part of the city that is home to a budding population of Asian immigrants.

Let’s get this straight: Noor is not the kind of place you’d take your parents for Sunday brunch, but it is the kind of place you might go with a few adventurous friends, especially if they’ve spent time in the

and are inured to the spicy, aromatic foods of

Pakistan

and

India

. The clientele was unusual for Athens. Several Greek women in the company of the owner, a table of American women, possibly students, with whom the owner, in lilting but very good Greek and equally good English, sat most of the night. And us, four middle-aged Greeks and one English long-time Athens resident, discussing the Greek elections on its eve. The décor is a hodgepodge of stuff put together more out of need than driven by a sense of aesthetics. Noor is a classic immigrant restaurant, the kind my grandparents would have opened two generations ago in an equally seedy part of New York City. The food was decent and the prices amazingly cheap.

All the classics of Indian Export cuisine are on the menu, with dishes slathered in thick tomato-based sauces each of which looks exactly the same but varies in degree of heat. The samosas filled with vegetables were a little on the heady, oily side. I liked the raita, the Indian/Pakistani yogurt dip similar to tzatziki minus the garlic. The papadam, thin wafers of spicy fried cracker bread, were a little greasy, but not bad. The nan, a kind of pillowy pita bread, was great for sopping up those sauces of varying spiciness.

The owner was honest in what and how much we should order, steering us away from too much. A few appetizers and three main courses for five people turned out to be perfect. I liked the pashwari nan, a thin flat soft bread filled flavored with sweet onions, sugar and cinnamon. The sweetened pilaf, with pistachios and a hint of orange, was pretty good, plainer than other versions I’ve had but somehow “real.” We ordered a spicy lamb vindaloo, doused in thick sauce and spicy without being anywhere near overwhelming. The madras chicken looked kind of the same but tasted a little more tomatoey. The tandoori lamb came with a side sauce of curry.

At the end of our meal, and after more than a few carafes of box wine from Thebes, the owner brought us a plate of Pakistani sweets, shaped like eggs and bright as Neon. These are too foreign for my baklava-honed palate to enjoy.

Noor isn’t the best “authentic” Indian restaurant I’ve been to in downtown Athens. The fun here wasn’t so much in the gastronomic experience of eating exotic food prepared by a native, but rather in eating it on the eve of a pivotal event in an area of Athens that epitomizes the changes this city and society have undergone in the last decade. As we walked back to the Metaxourgeio train station, someone had just gotten stabbed on the sidewalk.

Cuisine: Subcontinent specialties in a classic immigrant restaurant
Athens Area: center, Metaxourgeio metro station
Decor-Atmosphere: Islamabad meets Metaxourgeio

Service: Fine for what it is
Wine List: Wine and beer
Prices: 15 euro a person
Address: 43, Deligiorgi str., Metaxourgeio (close to the Metaxourgeio Metro Station), tel. 2105246644

Vardis

2009-10-16T07:02:00.001-07:00

It’s not every day I splurge on a meal at Vardis, one of several Michelin-starred restaurants in Athens, but I did a few nights ago with friends. I had been wanting to try the cooking of the young chef Asterios Koustoudis for a while, having heard lots and even written some about him.

On a Wednesday night in this nervous, tired pre-election town, Vardis was pretty quiet. Nine of us in total occupied the stately dining room. Our meal started with a glass of champagne and a plate of small amuses-bouche that included a chick pea “button,” a small, crisp, frilly tyropita (cheese pie), and a fish tidbit that seemed to me like a tiny take on the classic psari magioneza (fish with mayonnaise) that once probably ruled dining rooms in the nearby vicinity.

An offering from the kitchen arrived next: foamy but thick eggplant “soup,” with a dollop of yogurt. It was a tad too sour for my taste buds, but I am one known to add a pinch of sugar to most eggplant dishes, so the comment might be a purely personal one. We ordered a range of starters and main courses that covered fish, meat, and vegetables.

The eggplant, tomato, mozzarella tart was strange to me and less refined than I expected: shaped into a large mound, about the size of a hamburger, and looking a little spongy, covered with a layer of cheese. The pastry base was, indeed, not the crunchy kind promised in its description on the menu, but soggy and dense. It didn’t work for me. I tried the homemade pasta with calamari and chutney made with salami from Lefkada. The combination intrigued me and it actually worked, but again the plate was more rustic in its appearance than I expected. It was not a beautiful dish. The interpretation of a Horiatiki salata (Greek village salad) was much prettier and tasty.

We ordered two fish and one meat main course. My fish came out lukewarm: a good sized sfyrida (grouper) nicely presented with a spoonful of roasted eggplant purée and a very tasty tomato confit. I just wish it had been hot! The grilled fillet of sole with avgotaraho (botargo) and vegetables was not the winner we had hoped, a little bland but artfully grilled, no easy feat I suppose for such a delicate fish. The gourounopoulo (piglet), a hefty portion for a restaurant of this caliber, with bulbous caramelized onions, was tasty.

I was surprised by a few other things on the menu, for example, the mention of “agourelaio” (early-harveste olive oil) in at least one dish. How can that be—it was late September! If it’s last year’s it’s not agouro (immature) any more, but, well, “aged.” Ditto on a few other ingredients, such as zucchini blossoms, that belong on an early-summer menu. Maybe I am nitpicking, and I don’t want to because the chef is so simpatico and so earnest and devoted and serious and humble, all things that don’t make me feel good about writing what I feel!

Desserts: these were good, especially the Mastiha ice cream with ginger over the thinnest, crispest layer of kantaifi pastry. I loved the super bitter summer chocolate dessert, despite its very wintry richness. The lemon sorbet and the orange sorbet with honey were delicious. The lemon cream more staid.

Cuisine: Refined Greco-Mediterranean that the Michelin man likes!
Athens Area: Northern suburbs, Kifissia
Decor-Atmosphere: Stately, refined, very quiet
Service: Very good
Wine List: Very good
Prices: très cher! 60 to 70 a person sans vin (wine)
Address: 66, Diligianni str., Pentelikon Hotel, Kefalari, Kifissia, tel. 2106230650-6

Pasional

2009-10-16T06:46:00.001-07:00

Some restaurant locations just seem jinxed. These venues can't seem to house a business for more than a few months. I have one friend in the business who promised himself years ago he’d never open a place where another had failed.

But then there are exceptions.

Pasional, on Κapodistriou Street in Filothei, occupies a space that two other restaurant operators tried to succeed in but didn’t. Somehow, this place feels different though. On a recent Tuesday night, not a great night for eating out anywhere in Athens, Pasional was pretty busy. They’ve done a great job of renovating the place and have managed to create an atmosphere that’s totally in sync with the concept: Argentina. The décor is pleasantly baroque, done up in black and burnished gold, with ornate mirrors, waiters donning black ribbon ties, and pictures of an Argentina that captures our imagination. They’ve created a feel that works. The finishing touch is the grand piano replete with a singer who serenades well into the night as couples dance.

I liked the fact that whoever designed the place and the menu had something very specific in mind and stuck with it even through the wine list, which is 100% Argentinian and ranges in price from the low 20s to more than 150 euro. Something for everyone.

Considering the area, which is on the periphery of one of Athens' poshest suburbs, the place is reasonably priced. Three of us shared appetizers, one huge 700 g piece of beef, and a 32 euro bottle of Malbec for about 33 euros each. Prices go up the more carnivorous your leanings. (Meat runs between 15 and 30 or so euros per portion).

We started with the empanadas, which are like Greco-Turkish boreks, filled with ground meat or chicken. They were competent, but not especially memorable (a little dry). The provoleta, a plate of tomatoes and melted cheese was what it promised to be: meltingly attractive to this cheese lover. The salad Pasional was an overflowing plate of all sorts of vegetables, including hearts of palm.

Argentinian barbecue – parilla – plays prominently on the menu and we went for the 'oura kilotou' (rump), a piece of boneless meat the size of Argentina, which was cooked exactly to our specs (medium rare) but a little underseasoned (it needed more salt).

I liked the simplicity of the menu and its small size, which to me always means a conservative, careful approach to the food that is coming out of the kitchen. Carnivorous northern suburbanites beware: Pasional is poised to become the neighborhood steakhouse.

Cuisine: Carnivorous pleasures from the land of the gauchos

Athens Area: northern suburbs, Filothei

Decor-Atmosphere: Argentinian concept, black and gold, baroque and inviting, piano and singer

Service: Good

Wine List: Argentinian wines only

Prices: 35-50 euro a person

Address: 54, Kapodistriou str., Filothei, tel. 2106800200

Selene

2009-10-16T02:17:00.000-07:00

It’s a sad fact that residents of Santorini have done more to destroy the island than earthquakes ever could and sadder still that they continue to rip the soul out of this magical place by erecting ever more spectacularly ugly buildings. Get rid of the tour buses that choke local roads, scale things down to the island’s natural pace, and take a lesson from one of the few local business people who have managed to retain both a sense of exquisite taste and refinement for more than two decades now: long-time restaurateur Yiorgos Hatziyanakis, whose 25-year-old Selene is better than ever.

Hatziyanakis is one of

Greece

’s first professional “locavores,”—someone who sought out the island’s foods and food products long before it was fashionable to do so and with those simple foods he forged a gourmet restaurant that remains one of this country’s gastronomic destinations. This year he brought in one of

Greece

’s most talented young chefs, Constantina Faklari, who seems, in just a short time, to have understood the pared down essence of this island and manages to manifest it in her cooking. In a two day visit, during which time we sampled almost everything on the menu, one dish was better than the next.

Selene is blessed with a stellar view of the Caldera, sunsets to croon over, and cocktails to set the mood for things to come. I loved the pepper-studded Tselepos champagne (by a respected producer in Mantineia, Peloponnese), but was even more impressed with the soumada-vodka-mint-crushed ice creation of longtime hostess Yeorgia. It was delicious.

Our meal began with a selection of starters. The sea urchin and grilled artichoke was a favorite. The artichokes, crunchy as a pumice stone, paired beautifully with the unctuous texture of the sea urchin. Both were tempered by a smooth as silk fava cream and an airy lemon foam. The octopus carpaccio, shaped like a mound over smoky eggplant puree, was another sensuous pleasure, a marriage of taste and texture that I could have savored all night. Faklari marries the common with the eclectic, like her raw zucchini “spaghetti” with botargo jelly, an exercise in reining in the natural unctuousness of the botargo with nature’s most water-filled vegetable. The cold tomato soup with ice cream made of Ios goat’s milk is superb—the chef likes ice creams of all sorts and plays with them artfully. We tried two dishes that were remakes of stuff she was doing at Urban, her last post in crowded downtown Athens: a take on shrimp Saganaki with feta panacotta and a giant bean and cured fish salad. The shrimp Saganaki was presented in an almost painterly way and was a masterful approach to this often stodgy dish, but the giant beans with home-cured lakerda (salted tunny) were Greek food at its best: minimal, earthy, direct. A fava tart has been on Selene’s menu for a long time, but was definitely rougher around the edges before the chef’s intervention. Now it’s playful but classy, with a sunnyside up egg baked into the golden tart. She marries it with a succulent smoked quail.

Those, dear readers were the starters! Main courses that we sampled included a simple but elegant briam baked in phyllo with xinomyzithra quenelles. The seafood ravioli, which comes as two separate pieces of large pasta between which are nestled finely diced summer vegetables, fennel and seafood, is luxurious but also simple. The monkfish and langoustine orzo is another simple, elegant dish that won us over. The cod—that was among my favorites. Crisply fried without a trace of oil and served with three painterly mounds of smoked eggplant and tomato sauce. The piglet, a slow-cooked tender as a baby’s bottom piece of meat comes with an intoxicating side of apple-vyssino (sour cherry) purée.

I could go on, but room won’t permit, so I’ll mention but one of the handful of desserts: a milk chocolate Semifreddo wrapped in sweet white eggplant preserves and served with a fantastic vanilla-arbaroriza (rose geranium) sauce. That dish speaks tomes for both Hatziyanaki’s and Faklari’s culinary aesthetics: respect local foods and make them shine, excel at the art of seasoning with Greek herbs, and stay grounded while flying high.

Cuisine: Greek cooking befitting the magic of this island
Area: Cyclades islands in the Aegean
Decor-Atmosphere: A jewel in every way
Service: Excellent
Wine List: Paean to local wines as well as to Greek wines
Prices: 70+ euro a person
Address: Fira, Santorini, tel. 22860 22249

Santa Fe

2009-10-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

All it took was a nudging from my budding 16-year-old gastronome bemoaning the fact that she had never had Mexican food to book a table at one of the oldest Tex-Mex restaurants in town, Santa Fe. Athens is not exactly Mecca for south-of-the-border cuisine but Santa Fe has been around for a long time and serves up competent food that appeals to the under 50-kilo crowd. The margaritas are pretty good for us in the 50-year-old crowd.

The restaurant is on a back street in a popular suburb, Halandri, set in what was once a typical neighborhood house. The garden is lovely. Most Mexican and Tex-Mex food in Athens is prefab, with things like chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, chiles rellenos and more coming more or less already prepared (frozen) with little for the kitchen to do but pop them in a deep-fryer. That’s mainly because it’s virtually impossible to find the gamut of authentic ingredients necessary to prepare real Mexican food, which is a truly exotic cuisine rich in fish, pounded sauces, exotic flavors, and a rainbow of chiles and herbs that spice up and season almost everything.

Dinner started with—what else—a bowl of nachos and a little salsa, followed by a guacamole, the pounded or pureed avocado dip that is to Mexican cuisine what tzatziki is to us Greeks. It was ok, a little on the bland side, but fresh. The avocado shrimp salad was mild, soft and buttery from the fattiness of the avocado and the dressing. My dining companion liked it! Liking heat and wanting it, despite the mercury, I ordered a prefab plate of jalapeno poppers—jalapenos stuffed with cheese and deep fried. OK. Beyond the heat there isn’t much flavor in anything standardized, right? What was surprisingly decently prepared here was the steak, not a T-bone (which is on the menu) but the Rib eye, which was very large, thick, juicy and nicely charred on the outside. Enchiladas, tacos, fajitas and burritos, the flagship dishes of Tex Mex cuisine which have crossed every border to make it all the way to the Mediterranean, were also, of course, on the menu. We tried a sampling of them in the combo platter, which comes with classic refried beans and rice. The portion was Texas-size.

If I were 20 and wanted something “exotic” I’d love this place. But several decades down the line make me yearn for stuff that’s not prefab or nuked in a microwave. There once was a real Mexican restaurant in Athens that served some of the country’s most unusual foods, but it didn’t last. Santa Fe has, for years. So, who’s right, the reviewer who wants real food or the restaurant operator who’s survived, even flourished, on something in between?

Cuisine: Prefab Tex-Mex “classics” from guacamole to fajitas

Athens Area: Northern suburbs, Halandri
Decor-Atmosphere: Pleasant, fun, nice garden in the summer
Service: Good
Wine List: Ok, with some Mexican beers too Prices:25-30 euro a person Address: 30B, Ag. Georgiou str., Halandri, tel.2106859690

Piperia

2009-10-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

I am often caught between wanting to go to every new place and wanting to go back to places I like, in order to see, if nothing else, whether I still like them. Piperia, a friendly, busy seafood meze place in N. Psychiko falls into this latter category. I had been there a little more than a year ago and I have recommended it numerous times to friends. This time, though, I was mildly disappointed.
The place itself is handsome, all white, light, and pleasant, with old-style wooden cafeneion chairs painted white, white floors, big white lamp shades and butcher's paper on the table. The general feel is one of tradition gone slightly upscale. The menu has changed in the last year with an unwelcome (by moi) tilt toward more international fare and more gentrified Greek fare. Translation: the food has lost some of its character. For example, the taramosalata, made from white tarama (fish roe), pungent and fairly dense, comes served with homemade tortilla chips. We tried the black- eyed pea salad with ouzo vinaigrette, a version of which was on the old menu, too. This time around the salad was quite acidic, mainly because too many tomatoes threw it off balance. The fried squid with spicy sauce, also on last year’s menu, came out rubbery. But, we loved the fava, which had a beautiful presentation and a delicious, silky texture. It comes served with cracked black pepper and a smart combination of thin, raw sliced onion rings and sweet caramelized Stifado onions, which mellow the whole plate. Concentrating on starters, we also sampled one of the salads with arugula, spinach, and a creamy dressing based on honey and mustard. The salad itself is large and studded with dried figs, pomegranate seeds, and several pieces of crostini around the edge that are smothered in the soft goat's cheese, katiki. But the dressing is a little overwhelming. My pet peeve with most restaurant kitchens: please don’t let the salad greens swim in their sauce!
The main courses were less interesting. The pork loin (psaronefri) for example, stuffed with arugula and provolone and served with mustard sauce, is very tough, maybe because this normally tender piece was grilled. We loved the fried potatoes, which are cut thick and fried with their skins and served with a soothing yogurt sauce. The thin salmon fillet had no flavor and it came drenched in a syrupy teriyaki sauce that camouflaged everything on the plate.
Piperia’s menu includes, of course, lots of things we didn’t try, such as a selection of risotto and pasta dishes. Risotti included one with shrimp and zucchini and with mushrooms and black truffle pesto. There is at least one regional pasta dish, supposedly from Skyros, with spaghetti (!), and ouzo-sautéed prawns. The meze selection runs a gamut that I can only describe as Mediter-asian, with choices like salmon tataki and squid sautéed with ginger, chili, and soy sauce. The best stuff seems to be the stuff that’s closest to home. The seafood mezedes are plentiful and main courses include fillets of sole, guilt head bream (tsipoura), sea bass (lavraki), and more.
The drinks list includes a few choice ouzos, decent house wine and a small but competent wine list that is mainly Greek but also dotted with some Italian labels.

Cuisine: Mezedes from the sea and more, a Greek-Mediter-Asian mixture
Athens Area: northern suburbs, Neo Psychiko
Decor-Atmosphere: all-white, light, upscaled tradition
Service: Just fine
Wine List: Greek and some Italian labels, ouzo, beer, etc.
Prices: 30-40 euro a person
Address: 8, Agg. Sikelianou str. & Adrianiou str., Neo Psychiko, tel. 210 6729114

Peccati Di Gola

2009-10-15T06:29:00.000-07:00

I have to stop going out with the wrong people! People who are a head taller than me, the same sex, and who have stayed steady at around 50 kilos (100 pounds or so) for most of their adult lives. These same people who can indulge in seemingly endless quantities of carbohydrates with no obvious affect on their silhouette.

With one such person I made the mistake of dining just a few nights ago, at a trattoria of her choice, one I had not been to before, in downtown Glyfada: Peccati di Gola. All said and done, it was a carb overload of a night with mixed reviews and a finale for dessert that made me fear the scale the next morning.

Peccati de Gola, is a small, modern trattoria run by the daughters of the late (and great, for those who remember him) Vincenzo. The pace is light and airy, simply but tastefully appointed, and, so far, law-abiding. We sat in the NONSMOKING section! Dear readers, understand, this is a first for Greek restaurants. The law baning indoor smoking is actually effective. It was great.

The menu here is a who’s who of beloved Italian dishes, from pizza to pasta to risotto, as well as a few newcomers with an Italian passport. We started with a filling, classic salad of arugula, lettuce, walnuts, green apple and Parmesan. I was pleasantly surprised with the dressing, which was balanced and not cloyingly sweet. So many chefs in this town over do it on the balsamic reduction, serving forth salads dressed with syrup. The involtini di melitzane (stuffed, rolled eggplant slices) is another classic. It is rustic here, a full plate, not particularly artful in its presentation but comforting and tasty. Most of the rest of the antipasti were in the carpaccio, salumi, and bread categories (focaccia etc.).

Starch came first in the form of a pizza and we opted for another classic, the simple margarita with fresh buffalo mozzarella. The crust was very good, the pizza light despite the oily runoff from the melted cheese, and the tomatoes fresh, small, and sweet. My dining companion had way more than she should have! The next dish wasn’t such a success: I ordered the black, squid-ink risotto with radicchio and shrimp. It was so salty I couldn’t eat more than a forkful and so black it was a little scary. There was way too much ink in there. I expected to see the radicchio braised or sautéed, which would have added a nice bitter counterpoint to the rice, but instead it was raw and finely chopped, which meant it just got lost in a black mountain of Arborio. My friend’s papardelle with sausage, mushrooms, and cream was much tastier. The sausage was very good and the cream sauce light.

Then came dessert. It weighed about the same as a small child and looked to be about the same size. A jumbo calzone stuffed with Nutella and topped with a sprinkling of powdered sugar. I am embarrassed to say that we finished it, despite the pangs of guilt. But then, I washed that all away with my last sip of Prosecco, which was what we opted instead of still wine.

Cuisine: Viva Italia!
Athens Area: Southern suburbs, Glyfada Decor-Atmosphere: Simple, modern, cozy trattoria
Service: Friendly and competent
Wine List: Decent Prices: 30-45 euro a person Address: 50, Kyprou str., Glyfada, tel. 210 898 1511

La Rocca

2009-10-15T05:41:00.000-07:00

We set out with the best intentions and—important—the highest hopes when heading to La Rocca. I had read praise after praise and looked forward to spending a night at the dinner table with friends in a beautifully appointed old house in Makryianni, in the shadow of the Parthenon. The house took the owner around 4 years to renovate, according to our waiter. La Rocca promised to be delicious.

We had a small balcony with just one table, which made the atmosphere cozy and intimate. The Acropolis, visible upon twisting one’s head slightly and tilting back in the chair, helped fix the mood. Memories of a recent trip to the fabulous new museum made the whole thing seem somehow propitious. Our waiters, especially, helped the mood by being two of the most accommodating, polite, and enthusiastic servers I’d encountered in a long time. The main one recommended dishes that were “excellent,” an adjective we dared not question as they mentioned with near adulation the chef-owner Giorgio Muskens and his considerable culinary talents.

The classic Italian menu made our mouth water. Unfortunately, most of what we ordered made our veins clog, though, because almost everything came either drenched, swimming, or drowned in butter. Pools of it, glowing yellow like the moon over the Parthenon.

Vitello tonnato, thin slices of boiled veal in a smooth, creamy tuna sauce with capers, is one of my favorite Italian dishes and here it lived up to expectations, nicely presented and, despite the richness of the sauce, the lightest thing we ate. Another favorite Italian dish of mine is arancini, deep-fried risotto balls stuffed with mozzarella, which oozes out irresistibly when you bite into the ball. You might be thinking that anyone inclined to order such a thing is numb to the notion of light food. Not so. These, however, had no flavor. In fact, the most overriding flavor was the oil—old?—into which they had been dropped and abandoned.

We stuck to fish, risotto, and pasta for the rest of our meal, and none of them was great. The best dish we sampled was the pasta and pesto, one of the day’s specials. Indeed, as the waiter promised, the pesto tasted homemade. A classic risotto ala Milanese was OK, not too strong and a tad too bland. We could hardly taste the saffron. But it was heavy, heavy, heavy on the butter, which coated tongues, palates, throats, and God knows what else after the first few bites. A seemingly simple sfirida (grouper) fillet arrived having swum first in the sea before being trapped in the freezer, whence it arrived with its full panoply of scales intact and which no one had bothered to carefully remove. From freezer, this sad fish ended it up in a shallow lake of butter on my dining companion’s plate. Finally, the plate that seemed the most classic, aristocratic and refined came drowned in the flood of butter: delicate sole cooked in a crust of almonds (also fatty).

I rarely meet an Italian dish I don’t like, and even more rarely leave food unfinished on my plate. Sadly for this beautiful restaurant with its excellent wait staff and promising aura, I put my fork down long before the wine was over. That, a delicious semi sparkling Italian white, went down with ease. So did the desserts: a chocolate crème brûlée and homemade ice cream.

Alora, what to say about La Rocca. I want to like it, I want to go back and enjoy my favorite Athens neighborhood, I want to taste la dolce vita and dream of a trip to Roma. But I cannot.

Cuisine: Italian classics
Athens Area: Under the Acropolis Decor-Atmosphere: Beautifully renovated house in Makriyanni
Service: Enthusiastic, accomodating, informed Wine List: Viva Italia
Prices: 45-65 euro a person
Address: 1, Aggelikara str. & Ratzieri str., Acropolis, tel. 210-9223620

Jaipur Palace

2009-10-15T04:11:00.000-07:00

One of the challenges of going out to eat these last few weeks is that my usual dining companion fasts. There are only so many seafood tavernas you can go to before they all start to seem the same. But Indian is different. Just the variety of spices and unusual ingredients in every dish, and the wealth of rice, vegetables and seafood dishes, make Indian cuisine attractive both during Lent and during the whole year. The trouble is that until fairly recently it was almost impossible to find decent Indian food in Athens.

Jaipur Palace was one of the first Indian restaurants, but when it opened several years ago, I recall not liking the food very much. Back then it seemed both too grecophied and too “prefab.” That is definitely no longer the case. We had a really good meal here last week.

The kitchen, which you pass upon entering the trinket-filled, colorful dining room, was abuzz with guys obviously from somewhere on the subcontinent chopping, frying, cooking, and searing on the inside of a tandoori oven. That oven provided two of the most memorable dishes we had: a deliciously succulent chicken tandoori, pleasantly natural in color (most tandoori chicken in Indian restaurants from here to L.A. are literally dyed red with anato, a natural coloring agent. It makes the food look scary.) The chunks were spiced beautifully, lean, and tender. I loved the large shrimp tandoori, too, which were also deliciously spiced.

A roasted eggplant dish provided us with something sort of familiar—a kind of Moghul melitzanosalata, seasoned differently and very good. The array of breads, onion-filled nans, garlic-filled nans, buttery chapatti and more helped sop up at least one fiery sauce, my shrimp vindaloo, which I ordered extra spicy and which those subcontinent cooks obligingly prepared. Pilafs aromatic and gold with saffron, spinach paneer (cheese), mimosa filled with spiced chick peas, and other Indian specialties made us all yearn for a trip to Delhi.

Jaipur Palace is a vast improvement over what it was just a few years ago. A meal here isn’t Central-Market cheap: Those shrimps in the tandoori were a 35 – euro entrée, that’s about 5 euro per shrimp! Ouch.

Cuisine: Indian fare
Athens Area: northern suburbs
Decor-Atmosphere: Colorful with all sorts of trinkets, furniture, etc. from

India

Service: Good
Wine List: Good Prices: 35-50 euro per person
Address: Ag. Konstantinou str. & 73, Themidos str., Maroussi, tel. 2108052762-3

Hell's Kitchen

2009-10-15T04:03:00.000-07:00

I didn’t exactly grow up in Hell’s Kitchen New York City, but I knew plenty of people who had, many of whom later became well-known Greek restaurant people. Here in Athens Hell’s Kitchen is just a restaurant, not a whole neighborhood, but it couldn’t be situated in a more apt location, in the ever-changing dark heart of Athens, near the old Town Hall (Dimarheio) just off Kotzia Square, where junkies sadly crouch and prostitutes hover in doorways.
We visited on a Saturday afternoon for lunch, no reservation in hand because I never in a million years imagined I’d need one. The place was jammed. There are two floors, but, crowds notwithstanding, they don’t serve food on the upper floor. They will, however, let a table be occupied at the busiest hour of the day by a couple of guys nursing coffees. It a policy that’s definitely not cost-efficient! We waited at the bar until the waiter eventually managed to squeeze our party of five into a table space.
Hell’s Kitchen is fun, the food is more than competent, the prices are made for a youth budget, the menu is huge, the wine list totally foreign and the service well-intentioned but harried.
The décor is simple and pretty minimal. A long counter with high stools occupies the middle of the room and a handful of tables crowd the periphery. The bar takes up a fair amount of space, too. A mural depicting abstract buildings decorates one wall. The napkins are a very un-feng-shui black!
Salads, sandwiches, pastas, burgers, omelets and more serious main courses make up the menu, which is a potpourri of Greco-Mediterranean and American (Texas burger, BLT sandwich, Caesar salad, etc.) fare. There are two kinds of fries, the classics and the “village” fries, which have been boiled before hitting the hot oil and are soft, not crisp. But they’re good.
We liked the lentil salad, with its crumbled goat’s cheese, arugula, and sweet balsamic dressing. The green salad came with a large choice of dressings. We opted for the Mediterranean, which had a nice, slightly sweet flavor. The chicken saltimbocca with mushroom risotto sounded more interesting than its execution—the chicken, rolled with sage, parmesan and prosciutto, was dry. The risotto was competent. The pasta with saffron and shrimp is a simpatico mélange of tagliatelle, saffron sauce and small shrimp, an easy dish for lunch or dinner. Two of us ordered medium-rare burgers. Mine, a cheeseburger, came out well-done. The Texas burger was a more faithful rendition of “medium”. Both could have been a little juicier.
I am glad Hell’s Kitchen isn’t hell. Even though I really dislike noisy restaurants, and bemoan places that are so cramped that the waitresses can’t reach your table easily, Hell’s Kitchen fulfills its mission: it’s a trendy place with more than decent food that young in body and spirit seem to flock to with abandon on Saturday afternoons and beyond.

Cuisine: Mediterranean-American dishes
Athens Area: Center, Kotzia square
Decor-Atmosphere: Simple, minimal decor. Trendy, noisy, fun.
Service: Harried
Wine List: A limited selection of French, Italian, and American wines – nothing Greek

Prices: 20-30 euro a person
Address: 13, Klisthenous str., Kotzia square, tel. 210 524 1555

Filitsa

2009-10-15T03:34:00.000-07:00

Here in Ikaria, the opening of a new taverna is a major social event, especially if the opening is in mid July, when the Ikarians from Athens and beyond have begun to descend on the island, still restless with urban energy. Filitsa’s was the opening of the season here in Raches, on the northern side of Ikaria.

Located in Karidies – or Karies, as it’s pronounced—Filitsa’s is the result of a father-son team of professional chefs (the father retired after a 30-year career at the Intercontinental; the son runs two restaurants, in Athens and in the local port of Armenistis). Karidies is a couple of kilometers further up the mountain from Christos, the village of all-night fame. We were there on one of those recent 40-degree searingly hot days, but here in northern Ikaria, and especially in Karies, the nights are cool and comfortable. The place is appointed with local objects d’art! Amazing sandstone “sculptures,” carved by the wind into wavy, hole-ridden pieces of abstract art, act like walls closing off the front garden. A thatched roof covering provides shelter. The rest is fairly simple. The family hopes to run this place even during the isolated months of the long Ikarian winter and are in the midst of setting up a bakaliko in the space, too.

The food is a combination of grilled meats and good souvlaki, and more modern offerings that have a certain urbane flair without going too over the top for standards of this low-key, casual island. We tried a cheese pie starter wrapped like dolmades in kataifi pastry and served with some kind of berry fruit sauce. That was just about the most daring dish. The fried zucchini, cut not into rounds but lengthwise almost like thin fingers, is a house specialty. The fava, with or without seafood, is smooth and competent.

The pasta dishes are the mainstay of the menu at Filitsa’s and they are all pretty good. My personal favorite is the spaghetti with arugula and garlic. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an Ikarian specialty, but the pleasantly bitter taste of the roka married with the strength of the sautéed garlic makes for a great combination. The Carbonara is rich with cream and bacon, not exactly a rigorously authentic version but tasty nonetheless. The Yiouvetsi was a winner for all who ordered it, a filling portion of slow cooked lamb in tomato sauce and a heaping portion of orzo to go with it.

Filitsa’s is a bit of a trek if you’re staying along the northern coast of Ikaria, but it’s a nice change from the throngs of people in Christos any night of the week (after 11 pm, that is!) and from the sometimes psychologically distant environs of Armenistis.

Cuisine: Greek and local specialties as well as a big array of pasta dishes

Area: North-eastern Aegean, Ikaria island Decor-Atmosphere: simple yard with some local color

Service: still needs smoothing out

Wine List: Local, local, local and beer
Prices: 15-20 euro per person
Address: Karidies (Karies), Christos, Rahes, Ikaria

Elia

2009-10-15T03:07:00.000-07:00

It was a friend’s idea to go urban on a Friday night, girls’ night out. We all live within a 4 km radius of the Athens neighborhood, Ambelokipi, so Elia, Greek for olive, a place I hadn’t been to in a long while, seemed like a logical choice, especially since one of the group had recently been there and “approved.” Unfortunately, I didn’t have exactly the same opinion. Some of that difference has to do with better memories of an earlier visit; some of it has to do with memories of the same plates, a menu almost unchanged over time, which to this palate means that the kitchen needs to freshen itself a bit.

For one, cheese and fried dishes seem to be overwhelmingly present on Elia’s menu in dishes such as: pitakia anthotyrou (small pies with anthotyro cheese), flogeres me tyri kai zambon (phyllo flutes with cheese and ham), striftopita(coiled pie) with tomato and feta cheese, parmesan croquettes, yams with cream cheeses, eggplant cheese pie, meatballs with mozzarella, red peppers filled with kopanisti cheese. That’s a lot of cheese! I have always felt that one of nature’s great gifts to mankind--cheese!--has to be savored and used sparingly. It’s an easy way out for any cook to add a little cheese and make something banal taste a little better.

We tried a sampling of some of the cheese-laden specialties. The pies filled with anthotyro, a soft, mild cheese, were good. We sampled the meat pies with yogurt, with the yogurt mixed into the filling; these were an OK dish, nothing terribly memorable, but nothing to hamper the night either. The croquettes were heavy. Both the zucchini and tomato fritters were fried dark and had soaked up the deep fryer oil like a sponge. We tried to temper the richness of so much dairy and fried foods with a spinach salad, which was good but a little too wet. We liked the classic grilled stuffed squid, stuffed with—what else—feta cheese!

I wanted something on the lighter side as a main course and so went with the salmon in basil sauce, which was not very sexy! The salmon was a little overcooked and the basil in the basil sauce had somehow gotten away. The rump steak that a friend had was decent.

Elia seems a little tired these days and so do its waiters. There is a strange system here—an electronic bell—for calling the waiter to bring one of several things: water, a menu, to take an order and, finally, to bring the bill. But it depersonalizes the service. It also doesn't guarantee the imminent arival of a waiter. When we pressed it half jokingly the waiter arrived several minutes later, annoyed that he had been called to duty. If he was actually on the floor watching he’d have noticed sooner that we wanted to order.

The décor is as tired as the food. It hasn’t changed over the years. Overall, it felt to me like Elia could use some sprucing up.

Cuisine: Mediterranean banal
Athens Area: near the center
Decor-Atmosphere: contemporary and a little impersonal
Service: Not “saved by the bell”!

Wine List: an OK Greek wine list
Prices: 30-40 euro a person Address: 28, Mylopotamou str., Ambelokipi, tel. 2106910100

Cookounari

2009-10-15T02:10:00.000-07:00

The name, Pine Nut in Greek, is cute, the location refreshingly off the radar screen of the masses (i.e. Psyrri, Glyfada, etc.) and the food surprisingly good. Cookounari, a small, new casual restaurant off a small plateia in the northern suburb of N. Erythrea is one of a growing number of eateries that aim to be both reasonably priced and interesting. In this case, the interest comes from the Italian cadence of the menu, which is executed by an Italian chef named Astrid Sperantza.

The restaurant was a little rough around the edges when we went—a sophisticated menu offset by a relatively unsophisticated waitstaff who was still learning on the job. But they were polite and enthusiastic, communicating a sense of excitement that was a nice change from typical dour-faced waitstaff in so many of this city’s eateries.

I liked the fact that chef Astrid has filled her menu with simple, easy choices but with not much that is easily found elsewhere. She takes some inspiration from the traditions of her adopted country, in dishes like very Greek keftedakia made with very unGreek beef cheeks, served in a basil sauce. Octopus, so much a part of our own culinary vernacular, is here cooked with an ancient variety of potatoes, which happen to be even darker and more purple than the octopus. Visually, the salad needed something to brighten it up, but the flavor was there, earthy and satisfying.

Pasta is the thing to come here for, both because the prices are so accessible and also because the pasta is a break from the typical selection in other trattorias around town. Sure, there are classics, like rigatoni alla Amatriciana. But there are innovative dishes, too, and those beef cheeks smiled in one of them, braised and married with a hard wheat pasta that looked a little like rigatoni. Unfortunately, the day we went the kitchen was out of one of the classic greats of Italian cooking, papardelle with rabbit ragout. The ravioli stuffed with shrimp that I ordered as a replacement was delicate and elegant, served in a bisque like sauce. We loved the fusilli with chewy slices of avgotaraho (botargo) and tomato confit, too.

Pasta evaders might find solace in some of the protein on Cookounari’s menu, including a T-bone, ribeye, bifteki, and grilled chicken breast. But these are options for the faint of heart and plain of taste. The flare is in the other stuff.

The desserts had a share of finesse, too. The yogurt cream crumble with fresh fruits and the chocolate cake with a strong hint of rosemary were delicious. All time favorites like tiramisu are well executed. The crème brûlée with grappa sorbet was a little disjointed but interesting.

I like this trend. I like going to reasonably priced restaurants that don’t aim to be the next BIG THING, where the food has some flair and honesty and the whole endeavor seems real and accessible to ordinary folks who, even in these hard times, still like to eat out.

Cuisine: Trattoria fare with flair
Athens Area: Northern suburbs
Decor-Atmosphere: Easy going casual trattoria off the radar screen of the masses
Service: Still learning
Wine List: Interesting
Prices: 30-35 per person without wine
Address: 28th Oktovriou Square (ex Tsakpini Square), Nea Erithrea, tel. 2108002025

Cocina Povera

2009-10-15T00:36:00.000-07:00

I have this thing about flocking to restaurants that have been the darling of a fickle press for all of a month or so. Such is the case with Cocina Povera, a hot new place opened by alumni of the late, great 48 restaurant, Giannis Kaimenakis and chef Kleomenis Zournatzis. For all its hipness, attractive prices, cool but simple design, hot spot on a historic pedestrian street in Pangrati, and excellent wine list at very good prices, I fear that the name divulges more truth about this restaurant than its owners intended it to. The food at best was mediocre.

Supposedly, the chef hits the market daily and decides the menu accordingly. I am curious to know where he found pumpkin and pomegranates on a hot June 9^th, when we visited. OK, so you can find Chilean pomegranates at the local super market and maybe some sharp-eyed grocer managed to save a pumpkin or two from last fall, but surely 10-month-old Fall vegetables and fruit that makes a very un-eco journey half way across the world to land on a table in Pangrati somehow defeat the whole purpose of daily forays to the market. Isn’t that supposed to imply seasonality, especially when the owner goes out of his way to inform you? My second sense of something being amiss came after reading through the menu and seeing that fully half of the 20 items offered contain cheese, for me a telltale sign that a little imagination is in order in the kitchen.

What we did order, cheese-filled and not, was ok but nothing more. We started with a very simple ladotyri Saganaki, which was easy and fine. Next came the plasto, a traditional Epirote wild greens pie (what’s wild in June besides Vlita-- amaranth??) with a cornmeal crust. The pie was very dry and the cornmeal crust, which should be nutty and comforting, was instead grainy and brown, like the color of a rainless summer field. The tuna with fava sounded promising but was the most disappointing of all. The tuna still had some fine bones left in it and it was cooked but in a way that turned the core into sponge, the color of dried blood. The fava was overwrought with roughly cut tomatoes and peppers and an over eager sprinkling of black sesame seeds. The dish failed clumsily. A mille feuille of eggplant sounded like a baked dish of thinly sliced eggplant, tomato and ricotta but instead came in the form of three large oval slices, so over breaded that you couldn’t taste the eggplant or feel it in your mouth. Massive lumps of ricotta and a pale pink tomato concasse completed the dish, which tasted ok but lacked anything close to finesse. The risotto was a little better, even though it was terribly sweet, surely not solely from the addition of that Fall pumpkin? The salmon was well prepared, grilled to a juicy finish, but served with a boring, busy potato salad that would have been better off with a sausage and beer.

We tried another mille feuille for dessert, with pastry cream and strawberries, which was ok, a little on the rough side like everything else, but tasty. The only thing going for Cocina Povera is the pricing, which comes to about 20-25 euro a person without wine. But I wonder, isn't that a povera excuse for not thinking through the menu, its execution, and presentation a little better?

Cuisine: menu changes daily, Greek cuisine
Athens Area: Pangrati, close to Kolonaki
Decor-Atmosphere: In the general “taverneau” category of places designed to look like modern day grocery stores, right down to the wooden wine crates turned into side tables and holding bins
Service: Friendly
Wine List: Very good list and very good prices
Prices: Around 20-25 per person without wine
Address: 13, Eforionos str. & Eratosthenous str. (pedestrian street), Pangrati, tel. 210 7566008

Barbounaki

2009-10-12T01:28:00.000-07:00

Barbounaki is a fish taverna you almost have to go...fishing for…to find. Despite its central location literally across the street from the Kallimarmaron Stadium, Athens first Olympic Stadium, it’s small and slightly hidden from both pedestrians and cars. A friend and Pangrati native who walks past there all the time, had never seen it.

Barbounaki, Greek for red mullet, tries to evoke the timeless, casual, friendly atmosphere of a quintessential island taverna. White straw-seated chairs and tables, and simple island themes make up the décor. The tables are a small problem, even for our group of women all of medium height. Our legs hardly fit under the table because of a panel beneath the surface that makes sitting uncomfortable.

The menu is small and fairly ordinary. A bread basket comes with an accompanying raw salad of fresh tomatoes and onions. There is a classic selection of various fried fish, grilled octopus, fried and grilled squid, the standard array of dips and salads. We sampled the more “exotic” offerings, such the octopus Stifado, which is perfectly competent but lacking in anything that makes it memorable. That’s more or less the summation of all that we ate. The fried shrimp were limp and greasy, with nothing of the salty crunch that makes this simple dish so great when it’s done well. The same holds true for the grape leaves stuffed with seafood. If you’ve ever had this dish done well, it’s delicious. Here it was served cold and unattractively as just a handful of rolled grape leaves placed on a plate with a little yogurt. What sounded like the most interesting dish, karavidosoupa (crayfish soup), was a watery tomato-based broth with crayfish still in the shells sitting in the middle of the bowl. It’s not an easy thing to clean the shells off dripping crayfish claws; this is something the kitchen should do before the soup is served. The best thing on the menu that night was a squid salad, tossed with vegetables and simply dressed. We enjoyed a few plates of horta (greens), sipped a carafe of wine, but opted out of the spoon sweets for dessert.

Barbounaki is not this city’s most inspired fish taverna, that’s for sure, but it’s too bad. Obscured by the Stadium and nestled in an area better known for its bars, I hope this small place stays afloat. It would help, too, if the owners were more sensitive to the onslaught of cigar smoke from surrounding tables in a room not much bigger than the average living room. After 16 years of writing restaurant reviews in this town, I have still not been able to figure out why people are allowed to smoke cigars while other, equally good paying customers eat, even if they are seated in the smoking section.

Cuisine: Classic but uninspired seafood
Athens Area: Kallimarmaron Stadium, Pagkrati, close to Kolonaki
Decor-Atmosphere: Tries to look like an island fish taverna
Service: Friendly
Wine List: OK
Prices: 25-30 euro a person
Address: Barbounaki Vas. Konstantinou 2, Kallimarmaron Stadium, Tel. 6948 759119

Aneton

2009-10-12T01:02:00.000-07:00

There has always been something, let’s say, comforting (the English equivalent for the Greek word aneton) about Aneton, the small, well-known gourmet hot spot in Maroussi, where chef Vasilis Kalidis cooks up some of the most original Greek food in town. The setting, like a Greek living room right out of the late 1960s

, has remained a constant source of fun every time we visit.

I don’t get here as often as I’d like. The last time was about a year ago, with a group of friends, on a Friday night. My most recent visit found me there in the fasting days before Easter, tempted into carnivorous ways with little regret. The first thing we ordered was one of the best plates I’ve tasted in a long time, a velouté of fresh grape leaves. The color was like freshly cut grass in a bowl and the aroma and flavor tinged with the delicious acidity endemic to grape leaves in general. But the chef tempered this with a little potato and some yogurt. Soup lovers like me have a hard time finding good bowls to slurp in Greek restaurants, since Greece is not a soup-loving country. This was superb, original, refined, and memorable.

It’s not every day I can devote a whole paragraph to a bowl of soup, but alas I want to leave room for some of the other dishes we tried. The grilled spring onions with avgotaraho (botargo) was an interesting idea, potentially elegant but lacking the chef’s characteristic flair. The thick lemony sauce overwhelmed the grilled spring onions, but the botargo paired perfectly with them. I would have preferred great olive oil, a little grating of lemon zest and some black pepper to bring out the natural flavors of the season’s young onions. We loved the chick pea croquettes with fresh herbs and tarama (fish roe). For one, they looked and tasted nothing like the revithokeftedes (chick pea fritters) most of us have either had at home or in tavernas. These were plump and tender and crumbly, with delicious herbal undertones, and served artfully on a long plate. I couldn’t resist the Pontian pasta stuffed with meat and served with yogurt sauce. The dough, spicy meat filling, light tomato sauce, yogurt and touch of smoky paprika all make for an irresistible quartet at least to my comfort-sensitized palate. They were out of the peinirli (dough boat) with Armenian soutzouki (spicy sausage) and kasseri cheese, a classic gone upscale for sure at the hands of this able chef. But the shrimp souvlaki (skewer) and the soupies (cuttlefish) yiahni with spinach made up for it. The shrimp, medium-sized and grilled to perfection, not too dry, not too flaccid, were deliciously seasoned with eastern spices and served with zucchini and basil pesto. The soupies (cuttlefish) were also very good but even better was the hand made squid ink pasta they came with.

I can’t decide what I liked most at Aneton, but the desserts are up there in terms of favorites. Best of all was the childhood memory inducing “krema” (cream), a concoction of pear velouté, politico ice cream, and crumbled petit beurre cookies, This was an adult dessert with totally baby flavors and we loved it! The tahini mousse with strawberries and chocolate sauce came in a close second.

Aneton was one of my favorite restaurants a few years ago when it first opened, and it was comforting to feel the same surprise and pleasure at all of Kalidis’ original creations. I want the recipe for that grape leaf soup!

Cuisine: Some of the most original new Greek food around
Athens Area: Northern suburbs
Decor: Home circa 1965
Service: Professional and friendly
Wine List: Good
Prices: 45-55 euro per person
Address: 19, Strat. Lekka str., Maroussi, tel. 210 8066700

Almyra

2009-10-12T00:37:00.000-07:00

We were looking for a garden and a menu that was more fish than meat, without having to trek out to the seaside on one of the last Saturday nights of the summer. So, we settled on a place I had not visited in many, many years: Almyra, which means salt of the sea in Greek.

Like the name implies, the specialty here are fruits of the sea, with classic appetizers and a couple of meat dishes thrown in. Almyra is located in one of the nicer old houses in Halandri, just off Ethnikis Antistaseos str., the kind of house a pretty large family could live in happily, with a big, well-tended garden. We sat outside. Two other tables were occupied. Many Athenians probably were away for the weekend, one of the last before schools reopen and the winter frenzy keeps us all closer to home.

Despite the quiet, though, the service was impressively s-l-o-w. Our kids played at a table nearby and we adults sipped wine—that came fast—waiting for our food to arrive. The appetizers came out quickly: Haloumi cheese on the grill with pita bread slices (how can you mess that up?). It was fine. Grape leaves stuffed with mashed gavro (anchovies), which was totally passable, even though the leaves were tough and despite the fact that I had imagined whole silvery slivers of fish delicately wrapped inside small leaves. I am ever the optimist… The “authentic” Simi shrimp in a skillet was dead on arrival, soft and out of the water for longer than I care to think about. These also arrived fast. Then we waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. I’d say a good hour went by, punctuated only by the late arrival of a second order of that haloumi, which the two eight-year-olds in our company devoured hungrily.

We wondered aloud amongst ourselves and then aloud to our waiter, who was affable enough but rather unconcerned at the seeming disorganization in the kitchen that kept two plates of simple fried potatoes from reaching our table until the very last minute. And when they did arrive, they were fried soft.

One friend ordered the cuttlefish with greens, ordinarily an appetizer, as a main course. The dish was hearty and the portion good, but the almyra (saltiness) in the name of this restaurant morphed into inedibly salty in this dish. We couldn’t touch it.

The main courses arrived: fish biftekia (burgers), beef biftekia, and an order of grilled salmon with ouzo sauce. The ouzo sauce on the salmon was an ouzo-cream sauce, which was ok. The dish came with small broccoli florets covered in the same ouzo-cream sauce. The biftekia were weird. Two orders of beef biftekia had been cooked in such a way that at least one of the four pieces looked, well, soft and gray. It fell apart upon being touched by my fork as I attempted to cut it for my son. The other three burgers adhered better together and had a grilled meat color. On the fish bifteki, I had imagined something akin to a crabcake, tender and flaky and filled with freshness and herbs. Instead, two gray, tight, dense ovals arrived that did taste somewhat of something that might have swam somewhere, sometime, but with no finesse, no complexity, none of the sweetness of the sea but much of its…almyra. We left this lovely garden disappointed.

Cuisine: Seafood and fish classics and some taverna fare

Athens Area: Northern suburbs
Atmosphere: Lovely garden in the middle of Halandri
Service: The seahorse is the slowest moving creature in the sea. The service here is slower.

Wine List: Decent
Prices: 35 to 40 euro per person
Address: 39, Filikis Eterias str., Kato Halandri, tel. 210 6819109

Show Room

2009-10-09T07:23:00.001-07:00

Going out with the girls is always fun, especially when the backdrop is Missoni. OK, we didn’t exactly go on a shopping spree for Italian designer sweaters but we did sit on Missoni-upholstered chairs and amidst Missoni striped walls and tile patterns at a fun, new place in Milioni, in Kolonaki. The place is appropriately called Show Room, because indeed that was what it once was: the Missoni boutique in Athens.

Although my aging ears tend to like places a little quieter, what I liked about Show Room is that it is comfortable with itself. The place fits in almost perfectly with its location. It’s a light-hearted, downtown jack-of-all-trades kind of eatery, with a mix of Mediterranean, Greek and (a few) Asian dishes, a smart approach to dining that emphasizes the casual and easygoing. The bar is a growing scene in this place and the cocktails are excellent (although, it did take a little while longer than we hoped for a whisky to arrive at the table). You can eat at the bar, too.

The menu is still being tweaked, from what owner Alexis Klee mentioned. For one, some things are coming off, among them the foie gras and the pasta with crab claws. I think that’s a good move, since Show Room seems to attract a young crowd a lot more interested in hanging out and nibbling on finger food over a drink than on serious gastronomic indulgences.

That said, what we did sample was more than competent. The truffle risotto was tasty, its texture right, the portion large enough for a handful of us young-at-heart hens to share. I liked the concept behind some of the starters: with one title, you get three different small tastes. For example, “

Russia

on Ice” is a medley of avgotaraho, caviar and smoked salmon served with a shot of frozen vodka. East West is a selection of slim pastry flutes filled with the soft, sour Cretan cheese, xinomyzithra, to be dipped in accompanying honey and sesame, a few skewers of pork satay, and chicken wings in spicy sauce. We tried the von Berg salad, with lentils, couscous, smoked salmon, and lettuce, which was hearty and tasty. We liked the foccacia sandwich with mozzarella, fresh and dried tomatoes and pesto. The black cod was good, even though it wasn’t…blackened. Instead what arrived was a very tender, well-cooked, large piece of cod fillet served with a lovely light sauce of cherry tomatoes and leeks.

After a few bottles of Avantis Syrah, we were ready for the dessert: wedges of Valhrona brownies that were very good, chewy and chocolaty but with constraint.

Show Room is right on in terms of what this place is all about. It’s a hip, downtown bar-restaurant with a bustling all-day coffee and snack business. The recipe seems made for success, even in these crisis-ridden times.

Cuisine: Mediterranean fun food
Athens Area: downtown, Kolonaki, near Syntagma
Decor: Missoni-style--it used to be a Missoni boutique
Atmosphere: hip, fashionable, with a happening bar scene
Service: good but still learning
Wine List: good. an excellent array of cocktails
Prices: 30-50 euro a person for full dinner; snacking is less
Address: Milioni & Irakleitou str., Kolonaki, tel. 2103646460

Taverna

2009-10-09T06:54:00.000-07:00

I like going to simple restaurants on Sunday afternoon, kids in tow, friends at the table, noise, a little wine and then, once sated to the gills, home to dose with the newspaper. It’s a ritual many of us share every weekend. That’s exactly what we did at Taverna, this sleek, modern new, well, taverna, in Neo Psychiko. The little kids ran around the back, the big kids huddled together in typical teenage collusion, and the adults indulged in wine and simple competent food that doesn’t aim either to reinvent the wheel or to break the bank despite its chi-chi address.

Taverna is modern, with lots of glass, wood, and metal, a contemporary look that belies the simplicity and hominess of the cuisine. Starters include classics like feta with a sesame crust, fava (yellow split peas purée), Keftedes (meat balls), melitzanosalata (eggplant salad). The melitzanosalata was good and smokey with bits of vegetables inside. We liked the soutzoukakia (fried oblong meat patties with tomato sauce) and the eggplant with manouri cheese. The hortopita (greens pie) was only OK, but I have long felt that pita (pie) should remain in the realm of the home kitchen, since so few restaurants manage to do it well.

I liked the fact that there are always a few well executed ladera (stews cooked with olive oil) on the menu, such as arakas (green peas) and briam (baked vegetable medley). The grill is a special section with 6 offerings, among which we sampled the bifteki (beef burger) and the bifteki galopoulas (turkey burger). Both were tasty. The regular bifteki is large and a little on the dry side but surprisingly the turkey bifteki was moist and redolent with the aroma of coarsely chopped onions.

Amidst a whole row of cooked meat dishes such as beef yiouvetsi (orzo in the oven), chicken with kasseri cheese and capers (pretty good), and fricassée, someone must have gotten a creative urge expressed in a plate of spaghetti with cooked spinach and katiki Domokou cheese. We liked the klephtico (meat baked in parchment paper) and the French fries, too.

Taverna is a simple, neighborhood restaurant that welcomes kids on Sunday afternoons, offers competent service, competitive prices and more than decent food. We liked it.

Cuisine: classic Greek taverna fare, traditional dishes

Athens Area: northern suburbs
Atmosphere: sleek and modern
Service: friendly

Wine List: small but right for this place

Prices: 20-25 euro a person

Address: 7, Perikleous str., Neo Psychiko, tel. 210 6716803