If you haven’t eaten the stuffed calamari at Eat Greek yet, make it the first thing you do after reading your tabloid!.
It’s a plateful of Mediterranean summer flavours, served overlooking the beach at Dubai Marina’s new The Beach complex.
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. “Lemon oil is like our magic juice,” says the chef.
Anagnostou cooks from the heart, with a love of Greek cuisine she’s eager to share with Dubai residents who may not be familiar with it (until now, the only other option was Elia, at the Majestic Hotel in Bur Dubai — one I also recommend highly).
“It’s a combination of light flavours — to get extra flavour by using herbs, this is the twist we give to our food. We take the foods and fill it with all these good things that the Greeks have, flavours of herbs,” says the chef.
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.
The two-level restaurant is bright and airy, with a long wooden table for big parties and communal eating — a hipster spot with Greek food and music, if you like. “When you enter the door, feel like you are entering a Greek community. This we have passed to our back and front of house, because hospitality in Greece is famous,” says Anagnostou.
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 the restaurant 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 modernisation. “We have to grab the challenge to present things a little bit different, to keep something from the past but to give a modern style. You have to come and explore the new dishes and new flavours, and why not give us feedback?”
