Konaki, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Konaki

Review published on 22/04/2003 © Sunday Herald

One mild irritation about eating in a taverna in Greece is that menus are frequently theoretical. You agonise over what you'll have, trying not to be flustered by the Greek alphabet or helpful tourist translations like 'boiled village weeds', or 'flattened cuttlefish with skint lemon', or 'ground ewe with planted egg and grape fruits'. As you stumble through trying to order in Greek, you are told, often in faultless English, that sadly, what you want is not available today. Would you like to hear what there really is to eat?

At Konaki in Glasgow, every dish listed seems to exist in reality. Otherwise, it has many of the hallmarks of a Greek restaurant in Greece, that is, generous quantities of what is essentially home cooking served in an unassuming setting. Even the prices at Konaki bear more resemblance to the modest costs of a taverna meal in Greece than the typically heavy UK restaurant spend.

The proprietor is an enthusiastic and vigilant Cretan who comes from the elegant town of Xania in western Crete. Konaki has a real family feel to it and many diners are clearly repeat customers with Greek lineage so there's quite a lot of 'ya sas' and 'ya sou'-ing going on. But the expat scene can't be the only reason for its popularity. How many restaurants are already busy at 6.15 on a Saturday evening?

We started with skordalia, the classic dish of cold puréed potato mixed with olive oil, lemon and copious quantities of garlic. It was terribly Greek; simple, honest and delicious.

Getting into training for the main courses, we chose the staple village salad, also a good, refreshing example of its kind with ripe red tomatoes, properly crunchy cucumber, feta that tasted more of milk than salt and mellow, meaty olives, all sprinkled with oregano.

The moussaka (£6.50) is mountainous. It would easily serve two. I'd like to tell you that I ate a bit then stopped, but that would be a lie. A soft layer of potatoes, the crumbly cinnamon-spicy minced lamb, aubergines that melt in that unctuous, fleshy way that proper southern European ones should and a velvety inch-high topping of trembling, egg-enriched white sauce - this moussaka was unmissable. And let's face it, a good moussaka is up there with good lasagne among the world's top comfort foods.

Greeks excel at slow-cooked meats, often economy cuts, and here the meat in the kleftiko, a substantial lamb shank, literally fell off the bone into clear meat juices flavoured with fresh tomato and onion. What an antidote to the current fashion. Most restaurants rely on last-minute frying or grilling of prime cuts. I find that exceptionally tedious.

Fresh cod was slow-baked too in a fresh-tasting tomato sauce. Yet each flake was opalescent and moist. It came with oven-roasted spuds, fondant inside with an unevenly dark, crisp exterior seasoned with oregano and lots of lemon juice. It was hard to stop eating them. But the food at Konaki is like that. There's too much but you can't bear to leave it.

A more cynical restaurateur would buy in baklava or kadaifi, but at Konaki it's made on the premises. Ours was warm, buttery more than sugary with yielding pastry and lots of nuts. The galaktaboureko, or milk pie, was possibly even marginally better, a jelly-like milk custard flavoured with rosewater encased in soft thin filo. Served warm with single cream, it was positively dreamy.

Konaki has some really interesting, up-market Greek wines, such as Tsantali's 1998 Metoxi, made by the monks of Mt Athos, a bargain at £18.50. Most wines though come in around the £10 to £12 mark where a clutch of Cretan wines looks particularly worth exploring.

Illustration by Adrian McMurchie www.amcmurchie.com