Kellari's Parea Greek Bistro Visited 4/15/2011 4 Forks

Kellari's Parea 36 E 20th St., (between Broadway & S Park Ave), New York, NY 10003

 Sometimes when you live in New York you get sucked into the latest, hottest, and most blogged about restaurants that you forget that there are thousands of great unwritten about places.  Kellari's is one of them.  Lav had stumbled across this place online and since it was only 3 blocks from her apt we thought we'd give it a go. 


It's on 20th street which is totally not a street when you think of places to eat, but as we were walking down I realized there were several good places there: Rhom Thai, Mizu Sushi and there was another sushi place next door that looked good. We walked into Kellari at 8:30 on a Friday night and while it wasn't packed, it was definitely full of what looked like locals.  At first glance, the menu is a bit more upscale Greek food as they don't have any pita pockets, gyros, or souvlaki type dishes.  They did have a lot of whole fish and lamb chop type dishes.  

They start off by giving you soft sliced multi-grain bread and a pretty good hummus spread.  One of my downfalls was that I ate a lot of it, so by the time our food came, I was kind of full.  We started with Saganaki ($10) and the feta cheese spread ($8).  The saganaki was lit table side, which was pretty dramatic.  But unfortunately the taste was not dramatic at all.  It kind of tasted like over-cooked, dried out cheese.  I haven't had saganaki in a long time, but I think any kind of hot cheese based dish should be soft and gooey? Luckily, the feta spread more than made up for it. Ok, I know that it's just a cheese spread, but for some reason it was just really really tasty.  The soft pita that came with it was super addictive as well.  It was a good thing we had that to nosh on because the wait time between the appetizers and main entrees was a loooooong time.  This definitely knocked them down 1/2 a fork...the service in general was just not great, so they were lucky that Lav and I really liked our food.  I don't even think our dishes were that complicated but for some reason it took a really long time for them to come out.  I had gotten the Maryland crab burger with fries ($18) and Lav got the zucchini fritters ($11) and a spinach and orzo side dish ($8).  As you all know, as someone from Maryland I am super picky about my crab cakes and a crab cake isn't really a Greek dish but for some reason it just called out to me.  I must say, it was a pretty good crab burger.  It was huge and you could see and taste real chunks of blue crab meat.  There was very little filler in it, so I was really pleased with how it turned out.  It was served on a brioche bun but after having had almost an entire bag of pita I ended up just eating the crab burger without the bun.  The fries were nicely done and tossed with oregano to give it a Mediterranean flare.  Lav's zucchini fritters were also excellent.  They were little balls of fried zucchini and cheese and served on a mint yogurt dipping sauce.  Delish.  Another service mistake they made was that they brought out grilled asparagus instead of the spinach orzo (I will say the asparagus looked really tasty), so they had to send it back and then we had a wait a bit for the right dish to come out.  I only had a small bite of it, but it was a nice blend of flavors and I could see it going well with a lamb dish.  All in all, I was pleasantly surprised at Kellari's given it's obscurity.  I do wish the service was a bit better, otherwise I might have even bumped this up to a 4.5 forks.  Total bill was $50/pp.