These Greek restaurants showcase the cuisine's dazzling diversity

Darwin's Klimataria Greek Restaurant and Sydney's Ploós both opened in 2022. Their menus go far beyond moussaka and other Greek staples.

There is a wide world of Greek food that extends beyond lamb and moussaka. Source: Klimataria

Making over 200 vine leaves for a cousin's wedding might seem like a tough, repetitive job, but Foula Karambetis sees it differently. 

"It's fun," she says. "It's a family get-together and we'd do it all together." 

These dolmades-making sessions weren't just a nice way to bond with her relatives, they proved to be good training for her career in hospitality. She opened Klimataria Greek Restaurant in Darwin earlier this year with her husband, Nick Manikaros. The venue's name evokes those memories. 

"Klimataria means – you know the stem of the vine leaves, how they grow? That's what it is," Karambetis explains. The grape-inspired name doesn't just hint at the presence of dolmades on their dining tables, it also refers to the Greek wines they pour, too. 

"Klimataria means Greek traditional food," she says, explaining the menu's direction. 

Although the restaurant is only a few months old, its story goes back more than two decades – when Darwin-born Karambetis first met her husband during a year-long holiday to Greece.

"I was in a little island called Kalymnos, that's where my husband was born. He came for Christmas and that's how I met him."

Manikaros' past, selling seafood at a fish market in Greece, inspires his role at the restaurant today.

"He does all the meats and the seafood side of everything. I do all the traditional Greek food," she says. That includes the traditional sausages he makes with throubi, a mountain herb that's sourced from his homeland because it isn't grown here. People have to scale rocky slopes to find this wild plant, which tastes like a "more richer" oregano, according to Karambetis.

Greek food is more than just lamb and moussaka. Source: Klimataria

The menu is shaped by his birthplace in other ways, too. "Mermizeli is a salad from Kalymnos," she says. "What's special about that salad is the cheese is handmade. It's called kopanisti."

In fact, her husband produces it, and they complete the zesty salad with herbs, barley bread from Greece, the fresh flavours of tomato, capsicum, onion and a good drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. "Then we top it off with the throubi," Karambetis adds.

"Greek cuisine is big," she says. "We like doing things that you can't get anywhere." 

So there's the mouri, a special-occasion dish that's reserved for events like Easter. It requires lamb or goat to be stuffed with rice, liver, cooked onions and a rich red sauce. It's slowly finished over many hours; it sits in a wood-fired oven all night. "That's why we only have it as a special, because it's a lot of work."

We like doing things that you can't get anywhere.

Thanks to the outdoor souvlas, where her husband cooks octopus the traditional way, and a soundtrack that encourages traditional dancing, the restaurant is meant to transport you to Greece. 

"When I taste my food, I'm tasting exactly how I grew up," Karambetis says. Sure, the couple adds secret riffs to recipes, but she's mainly influenced by how her Greek family served pastitsio and other staples. "I'm doing [things] exactly like how I learnt as a little girl."

While Klimataria Greek Restaurant takes a traditional approach, Peter Conistis veers away from mainland classics at Ploós in Sydney.

"It's more regional Greek, which is my next chapter in Greek food," says the chef, who opened his first Greek restaurant, Cosmos, in 1993.

Ploós is inspired by Aegean islands with Greek roots, such as Crete, Cyprus and the Dodecanese. 

"The food is so unique, it's so different to mainland Greece," he says. 

There's the geographic influence of nearby Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt on the region, which the chef reflects by serving manti – "traditionally quite a Middle Eastern dish and dumpling, either filled with cheese or meat" – and reimagining it with a spanakopita-style filling.

Try Greek dishes at Ploós in Sydney. Source: Ploós

He also presents his take on gamopilafo, a wedding pilaf that's only served in Crete. It's served quite elaborately with different meats and is cooked like a risotto. "It's not cooked like an absorption pilaf like the rest of Greece," he says. "And they also use an ingredient that is only used in Crete and it's called staka."

Locals traditionally made this cultured, aged goat's butter due to necessity. "They milked the goats, they cooked down and clarified this butter and put it back in these goat-skin sacs and aged it for 12 months," he says.

"I've done a seafood take on the gamopilafo – we make our own prawn staka, which we age for a couple of months, to allow the flavour to develop,” the chef says. 

And instead of horiatiki, the classic Greek village salad, Ploós offers his remix of a nissiotiki salad.

"Nissiotiki was my slightly tongue-in-cheek take on the food of those regions, and it means island-style salad," he says. There are some elements of a Greek salad you might recognise, but it also includes new Conistis touches. "I've incorporated pickled samphire in it instead of using peppers and we serve seared sea scallops on it." He also brines a Greek sheep's milk feta in local seawater for six weeks, to mimic salty, ocean waves. "That's how we've taken it from being a classic village salad to an island salad."

That's how we've taken it from being a classic village salad to an island salad.

For his next Greek restaurant, he'll be turning to the Peloponnese and Ionian Islands for ideas. The food here contrasts with traditional dishes, "because it's so close to Italy and it was occupied by Venetian occupation for so many years", he says. "A lot of the dishes have an Italianate take on them and a lot of the dishes have Italian names."

Think bourdeto (a fish stew likely related to the Venetian brodetto), bianco ("a veal in white sauce") and a local quince version of mostarda. 

"They do a pastitsio like they do in most of Greece, but it's very much like a lasagne and then it's wrapped in filo; it's quite elaborate like a timballo," he says.

"Greek food isn't just about spanakopita and slow-roasted lamb and moussaka and so on. It's so varied," the chef adds. The plan is to open this new restaurant in the next six months and while it's inspired by his research and experiences with Greek cuisine, he's careful to explain that his food isn't strictly Greek.  

"Because if you want pure Greek food, you have to eat it in Greece," he says, referring to all the traditional ingredients that are unavailable here. "I just say my food is modern Australian, Greek-influenced or a take on Greek food. I stand by that."

 

Love the story? Follow the author here: Twitter @leetranlam and Instagram @leetranlam.