There's a lot of room for improvement in the Greek restaurant scene here. We do not have upscale Greek seafood houses like Montreal's Milos, or a precious, culinary-school Greek-chic restaurant such as Petros, a hot draw in Manhattan Beach, California. Matter of fact, we don't even have a single Detroit or Chicago Greektown-style taverna, where waiters dance, smash plates and pick up shot glasses in their teeth.
That said, I'm happy to report that the quality of our Greek restaurants has been steadily on the rise. Opa gave the local Greek food scene a big boost, and now, on a smaller scale, there is The Fat Greek, a cozy blue and white space in Renaissance Center West, at the busy corner of Decatur and Flamingo. This place isn't anything grand or creative. The one fancy touch is the presence of plaster statuary, tucked into niches carved into the wall. But its arrival does mean you can finally eat this winsome peasant cuisine well in this town, as the menu at The Fat Greek does make forays into real taverna fare: marides, fried smelts, a terrific selection of Greek beers like Mythos and Kilikia, the garlicky dip skordalia and a number of other pub dishes like saganaki, breaded cheese served flaming, and moussaka, the vaunted eggplant, potato and ground beef casserole.
Food is cooked from scratch by chef Yiannis, a man of considerable heft whom you'll spot doing the cooking chores through a window that opens onto the kitchen. He's really Greek-Armenian, which explains why this stuffed eggplant, a delicious dish done with or without meat in the stuffing, crept onto the menu here.
Look deeper onto this menu, though, to find dishes such as hummus, tabbouleh and baba ghanouj, Middle Eastern dishes popular in Armenian restaurants. On a recent visit, I noticed happy Armenian and Greek families chowing down on the dishes popular in both these cultures. Both options looked attractive enough to me.
In fact, given the narrow space this chef has to cook in, he produces an impressive number of dishes. On a recent visit, he ran out of rice just before closing time, and only one of the menu's three soups, a hearty lentil number, was available. But that's a good sign in a small restaurant—it means the kitchen isn't keeping things around after their expiration dates.
One of my favorite starters here is taramosalata, coral-pink cod roe whipped into froth with olive oil. It's served as a dip, accompanied by olives and hot triangles of grilled pita bread, and it is irresistibly delicious. Stuffed grape leaves are available with or without meat in their seasoned-rice fillings. Yiannis serves them meatless as an appetizer and meat-filled, with egg lemon sauce, as an entrée. Either way, they are terrific.
Smelts come perfectly fried, around 40 to an order, actually, on a large platter with the mashed-potato-and-garlic skordalia, and more of that hot pita bread. I'd also give high marks to the flaky hot appetizer tiropita, your basic turnover, with a sheep milk cheese filling instead of apples.
Naturally there is the classic Greek village salad, always done without lettuce. The parts are fresh sliced tomato, sliced onion, cucumber, cubes of feta cheese, olive and green bell pepper, all tossed in a vinaigrette spiked with oregano and lemon. Avgolemono soup is a traditional chicken-rice soup soured with lemon juice and thickened with egg, an amazing trick of food chemistry.
Dinners come with a nicely seasoned rice pilaf or French fries. It's worth it to pay a little extra and make the fries Athenian—in other words, dusted with feta, oregano and spice. I would come back for the meaty lamb shank, or a dish called kritharaki, what I knew as Greek rice when I was a child. It's really orzo pasta, gigantic, rice-shaped grains made from semolina wheat. Add rich, aromatically spiced tomato sauce and huge chunks of stewed lamb, and presto, Greek pasta.
But I was disappointed with my barbecued lamb chops, at $13.99, the most expensive item on the menu. I realize that this is a relatively low price for three lamb chops. Three scrawny chops are not a dinner, though, and most meat lovers will leave unsatisfied. Better to try the hearty moussaka, or keftedakia, fried Greek meat cakes seasoned with dill and mint.
If you have room, there are excellent pastries. One is kataifi, similar to baklava, except it has a shredded wheat crust rather than one made from phyllo pastry leaves; a second is melomakaroa, a moist, rich, baking-powder cookie flavored with orange zest, brown sugar and honey.
At the finish, there is, of course, muddy, sweet Greek coffee, and then a yogurt drink that you have to be Greek, or Armenian, to swallow.