10 Paddington Street, London W1 (020 7487 5088). Meal for two, including wine, £120
Modern cookbooks are the harlots of the bookshelves. They’re all “Come hither” and “Go on, you know you want to.” Recently I was flicking through the pages of the just-published Islands of Greece by Rebecca Seal, with glorious photographs by Steven Joyce, and realised my heart was fluttering. This wasn’t just hunger or appetite, but a particular type of longing, of desire. Here are recipes for tiny cheese pies with honey from a little village on Crete; for shamelessly vivid tomato fritters from Santorini, and whole bream fried in garlic sauce from Rhodes. Here is a beguiling set of dishes based on only one or two striking flavours. It’s not just the food, of course. It’s the shots of sun-dappled sea and blue-and-white houses and beaches of a sort I know I will not see for another year. It’s a fabulous book you want to have a relationship with.
The problem is, I am lazy. I am also often hungry. These are not great qualities when it comes to consummating a relationship with a cookbook. I know that The Islands of Greece and I will eventually get it on. It’s just a matter of time. But for now I wanted to eat this food. And so to Opso, a newish modern Greek in Marylebone which proclaims the attentions of Michelin-starred chefs from Athens, and with an ambition to make you look anew at what Greek food can be. The name is the ancient Greek word for “delicacy”; the restaurant wants you to understand that this food has a higher form than that knocked out by the myriad Greek-Cypriot tavernas across the country. Greek food, they are saying, can be sophisticated.
There are two problems with this. The first is that it’s already sophisticated. It’s the distillation of thousands of years of culture and lifestyle. The Greek repertoire doesn’t need a taffeta ballgown and shiny shoes. It’s fine as it is, thank you. A rustic, essentially domestic culinary tradition has virtues all of its own. The second point is that when I’ve tried restaurants claiming to gussy up Greek dishes, it hasn’t worked. And it doesn’t work here either. It feels clumsy, mannered and overwrought.
It didn’t start well, with a team of waiters hunched over their reservation system trying to find my booking. So screen-obsessed were they that they didn’t notice when I simply wandered off because I could see my companion already seated at a corner table at the far end of the narrow honey-coloured, wood-panelled room. Then we got the deathly waiter speeches: “Can I explain the concept of our menu?” You have a concept? Bully for you. I sometimes have piles but I don’t always boast about it. Menus don’t need concepts. They need dish descriptions and prices.
Then comes the killer line: “We don’t do starters and main courses.” You mean you just send them out in the order the kitchen likes? “Yes, that’s it.” One glass of prosecco, a bill of £120 and no, they won’t send you your food in the order you’d like.
With many of the dishes it would be hard to distinguish between them anyway, because they amount to pots of stuff on wooden boards with undertoasted toast. Don’t come here if you’re trying to cut down on the carbs. It’s not coincidental that my companion is my old friend Andreas, who is half Greek-Cypriot and has a mother who long ago made me reassess what taramasalata was all about. Andreas and I lived together after university and, occasionally, assuming we were feckless young men, she would send food parcels from Margate including a tarama that was creamy and had a pleasing tile-grouting texture. There was no acidic after-burn and none of the lurid pinkness introduced these days by the addition of beetroot juice. It was the sort of thing you wanted to dab behind your ears. It had subtlety and depth. Mrs Loizou became my hero.
And so she remains, for while Opso’s tarama cream is not Barbie pink, it is sharp and lightly bitter and loose as medicinal skin cream. A tiny pot of smooth chicken liver parfait is offered with another of apricot jam. I can’t work out whether this falls into the column marked “Greek” or “silly”. Tiny slices of bottarga, the cured roe of the flathead mullet, doesn’t quite live up to its description as a “Greek kind of caviar”.
Likewise, calling anything in a Greek restaurant a “tempura” is simply odd. It’s a serviceable piece of deep-fried battered cod, but the accompanying skordalia spread, which should have a garlicky kick that makes you hope your other half will still love you in the morning, is impotent. A braised beef cheek is a fine piece of ripe, slippery meat, all melting gelatine and soft fibre, but it’s overwhelmed by a lemon, egg and dill sauce which is so heavy on the citrus it refuses to let the beef have its say.
Much better is snails and chips: a bowl of crisp fried potatoes, piled with perfectly cooked snails, draped with a sauce heavy on finely diced smoky lardons. We pull out the meat and lick the shells clean. But this dish aside, the food here just feels like it’s trying far too hard.
We give thanks for dessert, which shows skill and greed in equal measure. There is a loose-crumbed walnut cake, drizzled with honey syrup, with both clotted cream and sweet-sour cherries. We try to forgive the fact that the same cherry mix turns up on a killer runny chocolate cake, (almost) baked in an earthenware bowl, with a scoop of cooling vanilla ice cream. We finish with highly acidic espressos, as is the current style. This is because they don’t serve Greek coffee, which is profoundly odd for a restaurant celebrating the repertoire of Greece.
Across the road from Opso is a branch of the Real Greek, the high-street chain of ersatz tavernas that grew out of chef Theodore Kyriakou’s restaurant of the same name before he sold it on. No, the Real Greek is not the greatest of places. They can have that strained identikit feel of restaurants run on tight margins, but foodwise the essentials are in place. Call us heathens, but Andreas and I agreed that, had we been offered a choice of a lunch representing the flavours of Greece, the cheaper chain would have got our money every time. And an awful lot less of it.
Jay’s news bites
■ I can’t suggest a successful upmarket Greek. Instead, for sharing plates from Italy, try Cicchetti in Manchester, part of the always-reliable San Carlo group. Decor is a little Footballer’s Wives, but the food is robust. There are crisp pizzas with smoked salmon, big dark braises of beef short-rib ragu for pasta and luscious risottos (sancarlocicchetti.co.uk).
■ The Leeds branch of burger restaurant Almost Famous has responded to complaints by blogger Helen Graves about statements scrawled on the walls of the ladies, by removing them. The slogans – ‘Why can’t I be thinner?’, ‘My boobs are too small’ and ‘Laxatives are definitely the answer’ – have now been painted over. The restaurant said: ‘Almost Famous is a young company – we take risks, but we got this one wrong.’ (helengraves.co.uk).
■ Want to help the British wine industry? Kent-based winery Chapel Down is using crowdfunding to raise around £1.65m to fund expansion. An investment of £560 gets you a 33% discount on the list price of all Chapel Down wines (seedrs.com – look for Chapel Down).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
