Aarti and I spent a lovely evening at the Tribeca Film Festival watching an episode of The Good Wife and seeing the cast and producers and were looking for a nice place to grab some dinner around the neighborhood. I remember that one of my friends who lived in Tribeca had mentioned that The Greek was a great neighborhood joint. I'm always a fan of Greek food, so we figure what the heck. Despite it being a random Sunday evening, the place was pretty packed.
As you can imagine, the menu here is Greek food (duh). There's so much to Greek food that I love and luckily, a lot of it is vegetarian friendly so it's easy to share a bunch of things. We had a lot of difficulty narrowing down our choices and when we started the ordering the waitress was actually like "umm, are you really hungry? Because that's a lot of food!" You know when the waitress says that, you've definitely ordered too much food. So we ended up with the small spread sampler ($14), octopus salad ($12) for me, greek salad ($16), pites ($16), and oven baked potatos ($7). We cut out the greek fries and the grapes leaves in case you were wondering what else we were thinking of ordering.
The food came out all relatively quickly. The spread sampler came with tzatziki (cucumber yogurt), tarama (fish roe), tirokafteri (feta cheese), and melitzanosalata (eggplant) dips with pita. They were all great and flavorful. The pita was sliced into thin slivers which was great for dipping but I would have preferred to just have the entire pita myself and to tear it up. The greek salad was what you would think with lots of juicy ripened tomatoes, cucumbers, chunks of feta, on a bed of arugula with a splash of olive oil. Greek salad is one of my all-time favorite salads and this one didn't disappoint although I would have liked a bit more feta in it but overall it was a solid salad. The oven baked potatoes were potato wedges baked in the oven splashed with lemon and salt/pepper on it. It was a nice summer-y dish - it didn't taste heavy or too carb-y.
While most of the meal was extremely solid, 2 of the dishes were a bit of a disappointment. The octopus salad was very thinly sliced slivers of octopus in a citrus-like base. They were sliced so thin that it was hard to tell that it was actually octopus that I was eating. When eating octopus at a Greek restaurant, I prefer one large tender piece of tentacle. The pites or phyllo pies were also a bit disappointing. It came with one spinach version and one cheese version but they were both on the dry side and too heavy on the dough. In retrospect, we should have gotten the Greek fries instead.
Overall, it's still a nice casual neighborhood joint that's a bit off the beaten path and clearly popular with locals. It's cozy enough to be great for date night or just as a place to catch up with friends. I looked at some of the dishes other tables got and the chicken and shrimp dishes looked great, so if you do go, I'd look to get few small dishes and maybe try a few of the main entrees. Total bill: $39/pp with tax and tip
Photo Credit: Yelp
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