IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME

REMVI Toorak Rd, Sth Yarra

Café Greco Chapel St. Sth Yarra

Café Greco Crown Casino

Jim ’s Greek Deli Chapel St. Sth Yarra

Eros Rundle St. Adelaide

 

A personal flashback to about thirty years ago. A much younger and much slimmer and more impoverished and even callow version of Sir Hinchalot was working and existing in New York.

Couldn’t afford expensive restaurants but New York was always a place where you could eat huge meals cheaply -especially at lunch time. Places like the Blarney Stone chain where a corned beef on rye and a huge mug of cold beer plus briny dill pickles and mustard only cost a couple of bucks.

And the sandwiches were so stuffed with meat they could have fed a family of four. Likewise the pastrami on rye or the hot turkey with cranberry sauce on a roll.

Then, as now surprisingly, you could get a breakfast of bacon and eggs - any style - with orange juice and as much coffee as you could drink for $1.99.

Pizza sold by the slice for 25 cents and there was no excuse for going hungry.

And as a young, culturally naïve intruder from the Antipodes I used to look in awe at some of the fast foods being proffered in the shop windows.

Including massive slowly rotating towers of lamb and chicken in the Middle Eastern stores.

That’s when Sir Hinchalot discovered such exotic lunches as pita bread pockets filled with shaved lamb off the spit and yogurt and onion and Lebanese cucumber. And garlic.

Didn’t realize just how much garlic featured in the sauce that came with shasliks and yiros and souvlaki. It may have explained why the love life was at such a low ebb around that time.

Flash forward to the late-Seventies and early-Eighties and after the footie at the MCG we’d traipse off to Richmond with a belly full of beer to order a pile of pita bread and taramosalata and saganaki and dolmades and lamb and more lamb. Being a Melbourne supporter we were usually drowning out sorrows after yet another defeat.

The Sir Hinchalot taste buds then drifted more into Oriential food. First Chinese and then Japanese but the memories of those crispy lamb shavings and the briny taste of the cheese with freshly-squeezed lemon juice and the rice wrapped in vine leaves for dolmathes never quite went away.

And in recent times having a Greek radio producer and personal manager hasn’t hurt.

Hence, Sir Hinchalot eats Greek food at least once a week. The habit started to creep back during a sojourn in Adelaide at a good Greek restaurant called Eros in the Rundle Street restaurant row. At Eros their lamb and their sausages are top rate. Plus a starter plate of about five dips and pita. But be careful. At all good Greek restaurants you tend to devour so much pita and dip that there’s not much room left for the main courses. The Eros house red is cheap and good value.

The best Greek restaurant I have eaten at in Australia is in Melbourne. It is called Remvi. Opposite the Como Centre on Toorak Road in South Yarra. I have mentioned it before and we have given away some lunches and dinners there on Derryn’s Indulgence.

Their meat platter for two (which is easily enough for three) is a masterpiece. My favourite dish: the small lamb cutlets. Char-grilled and tasty. Especially the indelicate gnawing of the bone. As with most Greek cooking two ingredients are inevitably used: good olive oil andfreshly-squeezed lemon juice.

At Remvi they have a baked lamb dish that is a must. It’s not always available for lunch because it takes about four hours to cook. But when it is it is a treat. The meat just falls apart in your mouth.

They also feature strongly with their calamari and their sausages. With a bottle of Tatachilla…. Beyewdifuul, as Con (the Greek) Fruiterer would say.

Jim’s Greek Deli has been going it seems since before the Parthenon collapsed. It’s been there on Chapel Street for yonks. I started going there about twenty years ago. For Italian food you go to Café e cucina next door and for Greek it’s Jim’s. Sadly I tried for a yiros there at lunch the other day but the lamb just wasn’t turning.

For a lamb yiros (or gyros) you can’t do better than almost across the street at Café Greco. It’s a huge Greek venue which reminds Sir Hinchalot of Manhattan with its red leather banquettes, huge menu, and super-tempting list of cakes and desserts.

The yiros at Café Greco in Prahran is good and for some reason even a little better that the same dish at the other same name venue in the Crown complex.

A favourite at Crown is their sardines. I think they call them whitebait but they are not. New Zealand has whitebait. What the Greeks call whitebait is actually a small, tasty sardine. Not to knock them. They are a tasty snack.

Heads, tail and all.

At all these places their salads are great. Well, if a Greek salad at a Greek place isn’t good what hope is there. Crisp lettuce, tomatoes, olives, capsicum and lots of fetta cheese.

Sir Hinchalot’s law: You can tell a lot about a restaurant by it’s bread.

You can tell a lot about a Greek restaurant by the quality of its fetta cheese. Trust me.

And by the way…. Can somebody tell me where the expression came from: It’s all Greek to me?