How to Eat Well in Athens - Choice Tables

I know: I’ve been a victim of it. Athenian after Athenian has tugged me out to this or that sleekly designed room with boldly geometric plates upon which intricately stacked food teeters. And I have wondered where the pleasures of grilled octopus might be hiding, and what had happened to the simplicity at the heart of Greece’s best cooking, which needn’t suffer from any inferiority complex at all.

So on a recent trip to Athens I set my own narrow parameters, my own traditional terms. I would eat nothing that didn’t have easily discernible Greek roots. I would go nowhere that belonged to the Cosmopolitan Hodgepodge school of precious international cooking. Rather than chasing the new, I would revel in the old; the longer the restaurants had been around, the better. They had stood the test of time.

My approach was relatively inexpensive and seemed fitting for a moment of economic retrenchment in a blessed, cursed, bailed-out country. I put comfort ahead of dazzle. And it led to some excellent eating.

Margaro

I remember the moment I fell in love with the restaurant Margaro. Five minutes after sitting down at a barely set table with a flimsy paper covering, I looked up to see a wrinkly, square-shaped old woman lifting a whole red mullet, about seven inches long, to her lips and eating it as if it were an ear of corn. That’s my kind of gusto.

At Margaro you get mullet, because that’s what everyone does and that’s nearly all there is. A shiny menu attached to our table by a rope — as if someone might steal it! — mentioned a few other fish, but a server told my companion and me that he could and would summarize the night’s options himself. We could have mullet, shrimp or langoustine. That was it.

We asked for a platter that included everything, and inquired about a Greek salad, for pacing and roughage. They had one, with a brick of salty feta and dark-hued olive oil, and it pleased without wowing us.

But the shrimp, langoustine and especially mullet were fantastic. Pretty much all that happens to them on their journey from larder to table is that they are dusted with flour and salt and thoroughly dunked in very hot oil. They emerge from it crunchy, like piscine French fries. They’re served whole, and while we used our fingers for bits of the crustaceans, we confined ourselves to utensils for the mullet, each one good for maybe six bites. We tore through nearly a dozen of them.

Afterward we ate halvah, a tahini-flavored delicacy that, at Margaro, has the consistency and taste of cookie dough. It was wonderful — and the lone dessert available.

There’s a crude, irresistible poetry to how pared down this taverna is. It is located on a random street in the port city of Piraeus, which is to Athens somewhat as Brooklyn is to Manhattan: a component of the bigger metropolis, stripped of some of the glitz and quickly reached by subway. Those flimsy table coverings are held in place by what look like steroidal paper clips. The white wine — only one generic kind — is served in metal pitchers. And there’s nothing that really qualifies as décor on the vast, covered front porch, which is where the crowd, mostly older folk, eats.

With exuberance they chatter and chew as a breeze blows toward the kitchen and platter after platter of red mullet is carried out of it. That’s nearly the whole of the spectacle, and it’s more than enough.

Margaro, Hatzikyriakou 126, Piraeus; (30-210) 4514226. Dinner for two, with wine, is about 45 euros or about $58 at $1.31 to the euro.

Doris

Just as no one who goes to Margaro misses the mullet, no one who visits Doris skips the loukoumades, which are technically doughnuts, but so superior to others that being lumped in with them is a hideous injustice. They defy culinary gravity in their impossibly airy crispness — or maybe it’s a shockingly crispy airiness. Either way they’re a textural miracle, and a taste revelation.

To get to Doris you burrow into a crammed central Athens neighborhood of narrow, slanting streets. The atmosphere is both functional and festive: a cafe of sorts up front, a big dining room behind it, a garden to the side, high ceilings, yellow and pink walls. The menu is scrawled in Greek on an enormous chalkboard, but you don’t have to understand it because most of the food is displayed in big pans and dishes — a lineup of the hoariest classics, which might also be called clichés. Moussaka, sagonaki, stuffed tomatoes: all of it is here.

And most of it is well prepared. I recommend skipping the Greek pasta dishes (dry) but making sure to have the grilled green peppers filled with cheese, which are superb. Get a bunch of stuff and pass it around. That’s what the Greek regulars here do.

taken from : http://www.nytimes.com