March 1992: A Greek Column, Part 1



This month I strut my ethnic bias, unabashedly.

The Great Greek restaurant in Los Angeles, where the energy therein pops with such unbridled exuberance that even the most melancholy among us would quickly snap out of our melancholia, charges very little for an incredible degustation of just about everything it serves.

Throughout the night Greek music lifts your spirits and the waiters—whenever they feel like it—break into Greek dances that snake their way through the restaurant, then out the front door onto the sidewalk, and then back into and through the restaurant. No guest ever complains that service grinds to a halt when there is dancing. The food is not the be all and end all here; the ambiance is infectious. 

Try to imagine, if you can, that sort of spontaneous activity in a Greek restaurant run by a chef determined to create, for your quote/unquote dining enjoyment, nouvelle moussakas, nouvelle pastichios, nouvelle legs of lamb. It would never happen for the same reason waiters never sing operatic arias (or even think about Rossini or Verdi) in Italian joints that charge 60 bucks for a plate of pasta. That sort of entertainment, even if spontaneous, offends diners already taken in by the restaurant’s charade. Face it: a 60-buck pasta dish isn’t Italian. It’s French.

Nobody has ever opened up a nouvelle Greek restaurant because nouvelle Greek is an oxymoron. Greek food is sui generis—unto itself. You cannot nouvelle it. You cannot tinker with a moussaka. Once you tinker, it’s no longer Greek. It’s a mistake.

Greek food is Greek food. It isn’t and can’t be anything else.

Greek restaurants ooze Zorba. The ones on Halsted Street, Chicago, dedicate themselves so completely to overwhelming diners with such an excess of culinary hedonism they should post a sign out front, “Warning: You Are About to Enter an Erogenous Zone.”

And that, nicely enough (if you’ll permit a digression of sorts), brings to mind Stuart Levin who, for many years, ran Top of the Park restaurant in New York City. Aside from giving guests fine food and service, Stuart had one other goal, as important as the other two yet, as far as Stuart was concerned, a concomitant of both. He told me, “I want the service and the food to be so good that when a couple leaves my restaurant all they want to do is go home and fuck.” You might say the same of most Greek restaurants: the mood, the food, the service, the dancing, the ambiance—all aphrodisiacs. Foreplay. 

Want to know why Greek restaurateurs break plates in their restaurants (and wonder why nobody breaks plates in Italian or French or Chinese restaurants)? Forget about the obtuse explanations rooted in mythological fable or bogus legend passed on from one generation to the next. Here’s why Greek restaurateurs break plates: they live for the opa moment; there is no tomorrow. “What’s tomorrow?” a Greek chef told me. “Tomorrow I may be no more. That’s why I break plates.” It’s the before-the-wake carpe diem, exclusively Greek.  “If tomorrow I die, why wash plates?”  


 

Greek food is Greek food. Period. Nobody I know fools with it. It is today what it has always been: layered casseroles of eggplant, ground meat, green beans; moussakas, pastichios, legs of lamb, and pot roasts; feta cheese, kalamati olives, and avgolemeno soup; kebabs of beef, lamb, and chicken; flaming saganaki cheese; dolmades, keftedes, spanakopeta, and desserts that make your teeth itch just looking at them: baklavas, koulourakia, koura-biedes, kadaife, and galatoboureko. A Greek cookbook may contain upwards of 400 recipes; but, mark my words or those of my Mother, every one of them is a variation of all of the above. Proof? The menu (left) for the Greek classic culinary evening at the Ritz-Carlton’s 1992 International Cultural Festival


In Tarpon Springs, Florida, where many Greeks have settled, there are many Greek restaurants. At the far end of the main street is a huge Greek restaurant. So huge is it—its hugeness, itself, an incongruity—so cavernous, so overcrowded and busy that you must take a number and wait for your number to be called when your table is ready, when the restaurant is ready to serve you. It is always full. While you wait for your table, you can shop in the restaurant’s gift shop for souvenirs. It is the Greek equivalent of The Olive Garden, a restaurant that pretends to be something it isn’t. The place serves Greek food, but it really isn’t Greek because in a Greek restaurant you do not take a number and wait for your number to be called before you can eat and you do not shop for souvenirs while waiting for your number to be called.

A Greek restaurant is noise and retsina and an unflappable Greek owner laughing and shouting, hugging and kissing. Greek restaurants are like Greek weddings without the ritual. On Halsted Street, one of the owners of a Greek restaurant (Petros, I seem to recall) will walk over to a table (any table he fancies) and throw ten- and twenty-dollar bills into the air and yell, “Opa!” as he watches them flutter to the table.

Down the street in Tarpon Springs (below right) is a very small restaurant, also Greek. It doesn’t have many chairs—30, maybe 40. The tables are covered with brightly colored oilcloth tablecloths. Wine, water, and Pepsi come in glasses that once held jelly or olives or whatever. The restaurant has all the mood and charm of tavernas on the docks of Piraeus.



                                            littleny/Shutterstock.com

It serves a Greek salad of lettuce, onions, tomatoes, hunks of feta cheese, and as many kalamati olives as you want and a yogurt dressing. The restaurant makes a great gyro sandwich, which is what you order, unless you want a cheeseburger, which is what you don’t want to order, but if you do, you’ll get one of the best cheeseburgers you’ve ever had. You get several plain white paper napkins with every order. The restaurant is a Greek restaurant because it is a place where you can get good food and drink and not worry when you’re going to give up your table to the next party whose number has been called. It is a Greek restaurant because it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

Today, nearly everyone who writes about food calls Greek food or anything else that tastes exactly what it’s supposed to taste like, “comfort food.” I think that’s about right.
Greek flag: stefanocapra