Elia, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Olive and let live

Review published on 29/06/2010 © Sunday Herald

As far as fashionability goes, Greek restaurants are nowhere. In the eating-out popularity charts, modern British is hot (less so anything branded "Scottish"- too tartan), seafood and Spanish are hip, Indian never goes out of fashion, Chinese and Asian endures, proper Turkish (as opposed to late-night kebab shop) feels a bit special, and French is always with us like an aged, death-defying relative.

Greek food, on the other hand, doesn't have the best PR in the world. You hear people being very rude indeed about it, recounting tales of tepid meals and limited choice. The space devoted to Greece in the cookery sections of bookshops is slimmer than any size-zero model.

The lack of enthusiasm for Greek food is understandable. Very few people come back from a holiday in Hellas raving about the cuisine. The problem here is that the Greek repertoire is narrower and less richly varied than, say, the Turkish equivalent. Greece has a cuisine centred on relatively low-key, domestic cooking, but this doesn't mean it can't be highly memorable.

The Greeks are past masters at any dish involving melting lamb. I still dream about the herby wood roasts I tasted from a beaten up shack on Paxos, and the slow-cooked shoulder collapsing off the bone served at the harbour in Xania, on Crete. There's a Greek vegetable dish called briam, where aubergines, courgettes, potatoes, artichokes and onions are braised gently for ages in olive oil and stock, which I could eat daily.

I will never forget stopping off at a bakery in a suburb of Rethymnon, also on Crete, lured by the butter-sweet aroma. This was when I understood that baklava, that oh-so familiar, generally lacklustre Hellenic pastry, can be magnificent, a delicate assembly of multiple leaves of crisp, fragile filo, layered with freshly toasted nuts, the whole thing soaked in a toothsome syrup of resinous mountain honey spiked with hints of rosewater, cinnamon and cardamom.

Elia, a new Greek restaurant in Glasgow, comes from the same stable as the likeable Konaki elsewhere in the city. There is much to like about Elia, notably the olive oil, which the patron imports from his family's groves on Crete. Fresh and grassy, it makes most of the olive oil we use seem old - which it probably is. You can buy this oil from Konaki for a staggeringly low £20 for a five-litre tin. And it's organic. The fleshy olives are first rate too.

Our mezze were variable. The grilled aubergine dip was suitably smoky, its garlic and lemon juice well judged. Taramasalata hit the spot, if you ignored its blushing shade of pink when cod roe is naturally grey. Dakos, a circle of crisp-baked bread topped with tomato pulp, oregano and feta would have pleased more had the tomatoes not been fridge-cold, which muted their flavour. Kefalotyri cheese was the joker in the pack. Described as lightly fried, it had the dimensions of triangular sandwiches encased in what looked like the orange "breadcrumbs" used to coat fish. You could barely cut it, and it was a right old chew. Mind you, the flavour was good.

Mezze come with totally standard pitta bread. If Greek restaurants want to reinvent and repopularise themselves, they need to bake their own flatbreads. That would pull in the crowds.

We were on more solid ground with the mains. Moussaka was substantial, the ground lamb layer subtly spiced with cinnamon, the fried aubergine and potato impregnated with its juices, and the whole comforting caboodle topped by almost an inch of soothing, egg-set bechamel. Slow-cooked lamb shank, kleftiko, was nudged off the bone under the slightest pressure and served with the customary accompaniment of potatoes cooked in the meat juices and oil, so that they become velvety and sticky, a bit like stovies.

Dutifully, we tried the baklava, which was the usual intensely sweet, but otherwise uninteresting sort, and the predictable Greek yogurt with honey. Here again, like so many Greek restaurants, Elia misses a trick. Why not make your own yogurt? That's the extra effort that sets you out as special.