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.
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