Greek Islands

Great, I owe a couple of reviews….well, let’s start.

The evening of February 27th, my wife and I and some friends were hoping to finally get together for an evening out. Turns out, we couldn’t decide where. Was it going to Matsuya, Dunlays on Clark, or another. Well at first we weren’t going to do Greek, but we all agreed at the end. HOWEVER, get this…there’s a Greek restaurant called Venus . Venus, for crying out loud. Now if there’s one thing I know (and believe you me, I know a WHOLE lot), it’s which Gods were Greek and which Roman. Venus is Roman, Aphrodite is Greek, for proof you may Wikipedia it. Unbelievable. My gut is some Italian who secretly enjoys Greek food founded this place (the audacity, first you steal their beliefs, then you steal their food…I just hope they didn’t steal Moussaka – that stuff is terrible).

So we decide to go to Greek Islands. Here’s the thing, I love all of greektown for this one nuance – free valet. Honestly, I’m going to be spending a lot of money at your place, most likely, the least you can do is give me free valet or make it breakeven ($2.25 a head each way to commute via train means valet should be 10 bucks – now I’m willing to pay up for the service, so $12-$14 is about what I consider breakeven valet price).

We’ve got a large party, 8 folks, so we get there and tell the maître de that we’re here and our party is moments away. He tells us to notify him when the party gets here. Fine, whatever, I’ll indulge your desire to make me wait longer for saganaki. The party gets there, as I promised, mere moments later, at which point I inform the maître de that we’re all here. The waiting begins. The fucking waiting begins. Not a good way to start off the evening. We were promised it would take 20 minutes. It took 1h10m. LIVID, that’s what I was. It’s fine that it will take that long, JUST TELL ME. I’m at the bar sweating like a mad man because I guess the owners wanted to replicate Greek’s summer heat in Chicago.

We finally sit ourselves and the group is famished and without further ado (read: without reading the menu) we just start ordering stuff for appetizers. Well out comes the bread (5 minutes later). Ugh, the bread. And UGH, the butter. I’ve spoken about this many times, SHAKE IT UP, serve me good bread, or good butter, or preferably both. Granted they also served olive oil, but it was a little too standard for me. The bread was a regular bread loaf with sesame seeds on it and the butter was the kind you get in the small package that you need to tear off the plastic film. It’s a Greek restaurant, please, please, please give me some sweet Churek. Thumbs DOWN.

Some of the appetizers start arriving, we’ve got a mix of stuff including: Gryos (better than expected, not the frozen crap), Saganaki (surprisingly GI has among the best Saganaki in Chicago), Tzatziki sauce (very good), and a Greek Salad (terrible, wilted lettuce, bad olives). Here’s the thing, we specially ordered some tzatziki and the worst thing possible happens, no pita chips come with the sauce, they expect us to put the sauce on the crap-ass bread they have. Are you kidding me? Get me so pita chips damnit! See, this is something the Mexican restaurants do well, whenever I’ve ordered any type of dip, the chips are in HUGELY abundant supply (just supply would work for greek restaurants), GREEK RESTAURANTS, LEARN FROM THIS.

Ugh, do I have to talk about this? The main courses. There was categorically NOTHING to write home about. Let's start with the fact that we ordered at 7:30 pm on a Saturday night and 3 of the daily specials weren't available. This might be worth knowing as the waiter takes our order. Tsk tsk. Anyways, my wife ordered the Mediterranean Sea bass (it’s only fresher 4700 miles away) – Mediterranean sea bass is bad, it has very little fat to it so it quickly dries out and loses its flavor, much like what happened at GI. I also got some lamb leg slices – those were bad, like really dried out brisket and I love lamb, very disappointing. We had another person get the meat pie. Not bad, the meat was flavorful, but there was surprisingly no basting sauce that was used. That’s surprising both good and bad. Good because the meat was still flavorful, bad because in a meat pie you usually want the pie aspect to soak up the sauce as well that way if you’re left with a bite without the meat you can still taste the juices. Someone else ordered the…ah, whatever, not even worth mentioning. I’m just gonna cut to the chase.

BREAD = 3. APPETIZERS = 6.5 (it was the saganaki and gyro that made it palatable), entrees = 4.5-6. Valet = 10.

Total Meal + Experience…drum roll. 4.5-5.5. I know, why so low? Well, all-in-all it was as expected with some kinda low hits and kinda high hits. Nothing special.