Review - The Greek Gastown

When you think Greek, you think of warm family meals, LOTS of garlic, olive oil, flavours of dill and lemon etc.   You often think tender grilled meat and the first dish that likely comes to mind right now is lamb souvlaki.   This iconic dish wasn’t even on the menu at our recent lunch at The Greek in Gastown.

The Greek Gastown is the newest location for this family run trio of restaurants which started with the much loved Anatoli Souvlaki on the north shore.   It’s a cute little restaurant just up from the Gassy Jack statue and we had made a reservation for 12:15 for a party of 10 to celebrate a birthday lunch.   We called to advise we were running a few minutes late, part of the party arrived at 12:15 and the rest were there by 12:22.   I happened to be in the slower group and when we arrived they were still setting up our table on the balcony, then they changed their mind and set up a table for 9 on the bottom floor.   We managed to squeeze in 10 and after asking 3 times we were brought an extra water and a place setting.

We were greeted by our server and asked if we were on lunch break to which we replied yes and then promptly placed our order.    Besides Greek salad and hummus the only other vegetarian option for our party was spanakopita, however they “didn’t have any of that…sorry!”.   We managed to place our orders and then sat back talking and waiting….and waiting.     I am honestly not sure why they bothered to ask us if we were on lunch break because other people came in, ordered and left before we even received our food.   Over 1 hour later everyone finally had food in front of them.

I have to be honest, I wouldn’t necessarily call what we ate Greek food.   It was definitely Greek inspired though!  For example, their dinner menu is tapas (a Spanish idea), small pricey share plates not the large family style you would imagine of a typical Greek dinner so their lunch menu is more expensive than their dinner menu.  

I had souvlaki, I do want to give kudos to The Greek for letting us choose 2 different proteins for our skewers.   I ordered chicken and prawn!   The meal was decently portioned for the price (not “Greek sized” like you would expect but didn’t leave me hungry) and included 2 skewers, two small fingers of potato, about 2/3 a cup of rice, a small Greek salad and a little cup of tsaztziki with a pita cut into 4 pieces.  I personally was not thrilled over the chicken as it was cheap cuts of chicken and mostly thigh or other brown meat (I know some people prefer that but this is my review!) and the pieces were quite small, the total skewer  had 5 small bites of meat on it.    The prawns unfortunately were overdone and chewy.    You couldn’t really taste the marinade on the meat and so once again I say, Greek Inspired but not Greek! 

The Greek salad was basically just a pile of spiralized thin cucumber with capers, feta, olive oil topped with 3 pieces of tomato and 2 very thin slices of green pepper.    It was tasty but again I wouldn’t have classified it as Greek. The star of the meal was the Greek potato which was perfect, fluffy with a bit of crisp on the outside, lemony and delicious.  I never eat my potato but I ate every bite of it!

I found the tsaztziki to be quite tasty, if not a bit thin.   I asked for an additional side of hummus and it was delicious, but not as expected at all!  Very thin and grainy and incredibly lemony almost to the point of overpowering, but I really enjoyed it.

One of the people in our party has some food restrictions and doesn’t eat carbs and asked for the souvlaki with just extra salad, dressing and toppings on the side to which the server replied, “why don’t you have a Greek salad and add a skewer” which sounded like a great idea at the time until you realized the salad was not going to be what you thought and that tiny extra skewer…..was SEVEN DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS!!!!!!!!!!!   The salad with one tiny skewer ended up costing considerably more than if we had just asked for them to leave off the carbs and they would have gotten 2 skewers of meat. 

I do want to point out that when this was brought to the server’s attention, they did offer to refund the difference.

I think the issue with the food here is just that it is inconsistent from dish to dish.   The Greek salad with no dressing was fully dressed and had additional dressing on the side.   Some people had large blocks of feta while some had sprinkles.  Some plates had larger skewers, while some of us had small ones.    3 of the people had the salmon skewer (which was apparently delicious) but one was overcooked and one was underdone.

While I wouldn’t tell people to avoid this restaurant at all costs, I would tell them to manage their expectations.  

·         The staff were pleasant but inattentive, this could have been due to it being lunch hour and there only being 3 staff in the front of the restaurant.  When we did have their attention, they were charming and polite.

·         The wait for a table and then for our food was unexplainably long and not warranted from what we could see.

·         Though the food was inconsistent it was tasty even if it wasn’t what you expected of a Greek restaurant.

·         The lunch menu was decently priced for downtown standards and you didn’t leave wanting more.

We may have caught The Greek Gastown on a bad day, but based on our meal today, it’s not likely that I will go back based on the wait times and inconsistency in the food.