Looking to relish your taste buds with sensational Greek food? Don’t worry; you need not to visit Greece for that. Now Dubai offers plateful of Mediterranean summer flavors at Eat Greek restaurant at the beach complex in Dubai Marina.
The baby squid aren’t the only thing I’d recommend on the menu cooked up for me by sous chef Vlassia Anagnostou and her team, but it’s one that symbolised everything I enjoyed about this restaurant.
Forget the stodgy deep-fried calamari you’ll find in other beachside spots. At Eat Greek, baby squid (Dh40) are packed with tons of green, fragrant herbs, including the ever-so-Greek dill, as well as parsley, mint, oregano and thyme, spinach and beetroot leaves — and grilled to tender perfection, while the stuffing maintains its crispness. With its lemon oil sauce, it’s tangy, bright, fresh and light — just what you want when you’re in a floaty summer dress and sandals pulling off an Aphrodite look by the sea.
Surprisingly for a beachside restaurant in what is essentially a strip mall, the quality of food at Eat Greek is very high, and the touch is innovative and light, with a focus on fresh ingredients — many sourced from Greece.
The feta cheese you’ll eat in the dakos is from Greece, as is the olive oil drizzled over the Cretan salad (Dh40). A hard barley rusk is topped with juicy diced tomatoes, crumbled feta and that other fresh herb of choice in Greece — oregano. Do you really want to eat anything else on a hot summer’s day? Granted, the fabulous azure sea views call for something other than an authentic frappe — frothy iced coffee — to drink, but it also goes down very well. Also on the import list: pita bread, honey and olives.
Beyond the squid, there are numerous other seafood dishes to try, such as grilled fish with lemon oil and fresh greens, or a wonderful prawns kataifi, large, supremely juicy prawns wrapped in shredded filo pastry. This dish was chosen over the more famous prawns saganaki for the menu. “We wanted to show it’s not just the popular dishes that tourists enjoy. Greece is a very rich place with very rich flavours.”
Don’t miss the innovative dessert (Dh28) of lemon cream, tomato jam and mastic ice cream — it’s seriously impressive, not at all strange and so light and cooling.
In fact Eat Greek is at pains to showcase dishes beyond those you might find in a typical tourist taverna in Greece — although of course there is tzatziki (Dh15) and gyros sandwiches (Dh45). Anagnostou says the restaurant is keeping pace with the style of food in Greece, which is undergoing a modernization.
So do not forget to satiate your hunger with amazing Greek Cuisine at Eat Greek in Dubai Marina.
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