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Dining & Spirits
Florida's Big Fat Greek Celebration
 Taverna Opa, with five clubs, offers good food and fun. |
Opa! No other word sums up the wild boom in Greek restaurants that are lifting glasses and breaking plates across Florida.
Greek restaurateurs are shattering stodgy formats but not the traditions of an ancient cuisine. Oregano, lemons, olives and the smell of the sea now flavor stylish yup-burban take-away, gourmet tavernas and table-dancing nightclubs.
Even Louis Pappas, who was born into a Greek restaurant family, is a bit surprised. At 16, he started at in his grandfather’s landmark restaurant on the docks of Tarpon Springs, nourishing sponge divers and crowds of non-Greeks with a taste of Hellenic home.
Forty years later he took Greek flavors to posher neighborhoods in six Louis Pappas Market Cafes he calls New Generation Greek. The décor is Starbucks-smart, with shiny mosaic, Fiesta-style china and polished wood; the menu has hefty entrees, spinach pies, flat bread pizza, moussaka and mountainous salads from $7 to $12.
 Pastitsio and mousaka from Louis Pappas |
Still he was amazed when his son held his Miami graduation party at Taverna Opa, where an ouzo-spilling crowd danced on tables, bellies gyrated and plates crashed. “It was just like a nightclub in Greece.” For the last 10 years Greek clubs have drawn a new generation that skips martini bars to dance like Zorba to the bouzouki late into the night.
Greek clubs pour more fun and have plenty of takers. Taverna Opa now has five clubs stretching to Orlando. Tampa-based Acropolis now has three. The new wave is lapping Clearwater, not far from old Tarpon, where Toronto Greeks have opened an elegant and lively Greektown Grille.
Greek food is up late and uptown, searching for white tablecloth diners. Taverna Opa, for instance, has just opened Anise Taverna in Miami, a more sophisticated room where entrees reach $25 and up. When Café Margaux’s Alex and Pamela Litras opened Ulysses Prime in Cocoa with $75 Kobe A5 rib-eyes, it was touched with egg lemon soup, a vegetarian entrée of eggplant and roasted tomato and grilled seafood. “It’s not a Greek restaurant,” Litras says, “but if you had a fine dining restaurant in Greece that was a steakhouse, what you would do for native flavor.”
Years removed from the tiny pita shop or friendly mom-and-pop, New Greeks are from the same place. Some say the boom started with the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding; others trace it to the “Mediterranean Diet’’ promotion as heart healthy 15 years ago. Or simply to a delicious convergence of modern trends.
Greeks were an old force in restaurants, although many served more pizza and blue plate specials than ancestral dishes. Yet the range from egg lemon soup and pastitsio to hummus and Greek salads satisfied both the hunger for comfort food and a yearning for healthful diets. (The fast-food chain, Pita Pit, has 200 stores, including 13 in Florida.)
Mediterranean cuisine? Greece is in the middle of a sea of olive oil between Spain and Italy and the Levant. Small plates and bar food? The meze is piled with munchies hot and cold, sardines, feta, fried zucchini, dolmades, olives, dips, flaming cheese, keftede meatballs and more in the kitchen.
In any format, the strong tastes of Greece are simple and rustic. There’s really no “Mediterranean diet.” The secret is that Greeks eat a lot of fruits and nuts, lots of yogurt and unprocessed foods. If they wanted yogurt, they went up on the hill and milked the goat and made it at home.
Food prep is simple. Even at Florida’s priciest Greek restaurants, big hunks of octopus and the tiniest smelt are grilled or roasted plainly with ladolemono (lemon, olive oil and oregano) or fried quick and crisp.
Not nouvelle or trendy, just the way it’s always been done in Greece. Which, as a sign at Taverna Opa reminds diners and partiers: “It’s not a movie; it’s a country.”
Opa!
