Restaurants: Big Fat Greek Flop

The problem with watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (the U.K. version, which is much less focused on contrived foul-mouthed confrontations, melodramatic voiceovers, and cockroaches than Kitchen Nightmares U.S.A.) is that, once you’ve seen what some restaurateurs get up to when no one is watching, you never again want to eat at a restaurant unless you’ve first inspected the kitchen.  Inevitably, you think, the “chef” will be some catering school drop-out who would rather be smoking hash out back, or some lazy line cook will sauce your lamb shank with disgusting goop that’s been left out for the rats to use as a toilet, or the entire dinner will have been bought in pre-made from Sainsbury and reheated in a microwave.

I can't say for sure, but it sure seemed to us that the last of these is what we got at Bacchus Greek Taverna in Hampstead on Friday night. We were looking for an early dinner after our Friday night pint at The Holly Bush; Bacchus is right down the hill on Heath Street. It’s brightly lit and has a charming enough interior, accented with vaguely Greek bric-a-brac.  When we showed up at the door with a pram – always a tricky proposition, because most restaurants here are very small and, by London standards, Jack’s pram is the size of a small lorry – the staff were very helpful and quickly made space for us.

Heidi went upstairs to use the restroom, and while she was gone I realized we probably had made a mistake.  The other parties in the restaurant all were American.  That doesn’t necessarily mean they were tourists, but it was a pretty good indication that the locals were not flocking to Bacchus to satisfy their cravings for Greek.

Then I realized that the conversation behind me was, in fact, a diner sending back an entire plate of lamb, complaining that it was unchewable.  (Credit the wait staff – the waitress immediately offered to bring him something else, and the manager tried to comp the meal, an offer the diner refused.  I’m glad he paid for it because both he and his companion were the sort of irritating pretentious prigs that sometimes make me ashamed of my American accent. Someone needed to pay for making me sit within earshot of their interminably self-centered, self-righteous conversation.)

The menu offered the same Greek stuff you can get at any Greek restaurant anywhere, according to Heidi, who actually lived in Greece.  (Me, I haven’t been to a Greek restaurant since 1988, when I went to a place on 113^th Street in New York and discovered that I don’t like grape leaves. Okay, last parenthetical, at least until the next one.)

For a starter we ordered spanakopita, which is feta cheese and spinach wrapped in filo dough.  Sounds delicious, doesn’t it?  It wasn’t.  I don’t know Greek food, but I’ve cooked with filo and I know how it’s supposed to be – crisp and ultra-flaky and absolutely divine.  What we were served was soggy and mushy, obviously frozen and reheated.  If you’ve ever reheated a two-day old egg roll in the microwave, you know exactly the consistency I’m talking about.

For my main course, I ordered moussaka (a bit like a Greek shepherd’s pie) and Heidi got chicken kebab with rice pilaf.  I suspected immediately the moussaka had been bought in, because it was served in exactly the same sort of single-serving dish you would get from the frozen food case at Waitrose.  Also, the layer of béchamel and cheese on top was suspiciously smooth and uniform, as if it had been machined, like one of those plastic food displays you see in Japanese restaurants.  To test my theory I drilled down to the middle, and sure enough, it was cold.  Frozen and reheated, poorly.

Heidi thought her kebab was okay. It’s hard to screw up little cubes of (supposedly) grilled chicken, but to me, the chicken looked like it had been sautéed with the heat too low – there were no grill marks, and only tiny patches of browning.  There was no question, though, that the rice pilaf was grossly undercooked and soupy.  I tried a forkful, and it was like chewing pebbles in a watery paste sauce.

When the dessert menu came, all pretense was dropped.  The dessert menu clearly had been printed for Bacchus and provided by the catering company that supplies the (probably frozen) desserts – I know this because the catering company’s logo was on the back of the menu. Needless to say, we passed on pudding.

The Verdict: Two thumbs way, way down.  It’s a shame, really.  A reasonably priced, family-run Greek place serving fresh, rustic dishes would be a nice alternative to have in this neighborhood.