Where to get your hands on the best Greek food and wine in London

“Greek food can be a bit salady” said a friend recently and I knew exactly what he meant. Not the cuisine in general, but the way we tend to experience it in the UK. It gets sort of lumped in with Turkish and a broad interpretation of Middle Eastern cooking – there will be aubergines and probably some incarnation of a fava bean (broad bean) in its fresh or dried state. There may be cumin, cinnamon and coriander. Salad vegetables will likely be cut into cubes, cheese will be sour and slightly wet/ cooked until rubbery/stringy. Quite often there’s an octopus.

Many immigrant cuisines in the UK begin their lives over here, perceived as generic and “cheaper” options. Think of Chinese restaurants, how they were seen as places to go after a few beers. It is only relatively recently that we started to recognise and enjoy regional Chinese cuisine and, more importantly, be willing to pay higher prices for top quality Chinese cooking, like that at one of my absolute favourite London restaurants A Wong, now recognized by Michelin with two stars.

Perhaps we are territorial, or we don’t trust easily, or are afraid of new things? It seems to take a while for Brits to accept a “foreign” resturant as more than a place to go when you need blotting paper for booze, or a cheap and cheerful option to take the in-laws when they visit. Although Italian and Japanese restaurants appeared to bypass this, heading straight to “date night”.

OPSO Restaurant, in Marylebone has been around for a while now. It’s a modern Greek restaurant, set over two floors, with a long skinny area of outdoor seating on the street. As you descend the staircase to the lower floor of the restaurant, you are confronted with a large, dry aging fridge, with glowing lighting, filled with hanging cuts of meat; next door another fridge is filled with smoked cheeses.

I love a restaurant that displays its wares – to me that’s a bit of a flex, both showing and instilling confidence. Recently I was at my friend Zor’s place in Singapore, where the bar/lounge area has a fridge full of plucked aging pigeons. I kind of loved it.

OPSO is “posh”, no question. Not just because of the address and the expensive ingredients on display - there’s more to it than that. I mean, I can’t deny that it is ‘salady’ but, it is ‘salady’ in a fancy way; the tarama isn’t pink sludge – it is spiked with bottarga for extra umami and topped with a shiso leaf, which looks pretty.

There’s some elegant plating here - oblongs of seared tuna – their centres clear garnet in colour and near raw in texture are served with fava beans – but ones that are light and not clattered with petrol-like olive oil, rather whipped into a delicate cream, retaining that weird earth-meets-chlorophyll thing that fava beans do.  

There is a breaded and deep fried smoky cheese, a metsovone, cut from one of the huge sausage shaped cheeses in the fridge. This is surprisingly complex in flavour – it looks very unassuming - a circle covered with golden breadcrumbs, but the flavour is more than basic bacon-like smoke aromas – there’s a bitterness, which balances the slightly sweet cheese and fig jam served alongside it.

Of course there are aubergines – a cinnamon-sweet sticky one served with lots of feta, and a viciously bitter one, piled with the slenderest shreds of fried potato in a reincarnation of a moussaka. At my visit there wasn’t an octopus. Although, they do have it, I spotted it on the website..

I’m implying that I made this great discovery, of a posh Greek restaurant, in a grand bit of London, but that’s not the truth. What actually happened is that I received an invitation from a very lovely PR on behalf of Maltby&Greek, UK based suppliers of Greek products. They were hosting a wine tasting and dinner at OPSO, showcasing a range of wines by Domaine Karanika, a wine business founded in 2004 and based in northwest Greece.

Karanika appear to be champions of the Xinomavro grape, an indigenous Greek red varietal with similar qualities to Nebbiolo. Wines made from Xinomavro are akin to Barolo, which I know is a lazy thing to say, but to be honest, I think people will understand that more than me wanging on about thickness of skins and geography. And who in the world doesn’t love Barolo? If you know anyone, tell them I never want to hang out with them.

Xinomavro has high acidity and tannins, which means it can make wines that last and improve with age. It’s often used to make quality still reds, but the Karanika house make sparkling with it, so winemaker Laurens M Hartman-Karanika leads us through a selection of sparkling wines and two reds.

Laurens and his wife Annette Van Kampen moved from Holland  to Greece in order to make wines in harmony with the land as much as possible. Now even when I type that, I start to think about murky wines that smell slightly of armpit or dirty gym bag – or wines with really aggressive tannins and mouth-puckering unpleasantness. If you have been reading me for a while, you will know that I have never jumped on the natural wine train. Nor do I wear bright orange lipstick, neon nails, have a blunt too-short fringe, or undercut, or sport winsome tattoos in the crook of my elbow - and no offence to anyone who does these things– I’m just not that sort.

I will, however, absolutely drink natural wine if it is unnatural-presenting, and by that I mean  if it is clean-tasting, pure and well-made. I actually don’t really care how wine is made – you can sing songs to it, ferment it in a cow horn or make it in a  pristine laboratory if you like, up to you. Is it nice? Yes? Then I will drink it.

So – what did I discover to share with you, aside from OPSO  as a great place to have a posh Greek meal?

I have two wines to recommend from the Karanika house - one extraordinary Limniona with faint chalky notes [see top pic] a pure almost menthol cherry perfume and the very faintest touch of sweaty leather. I adored it, I think you should all buy it, it would be the dream Christmas, and also barbecue  wine (there is an overlap, trust me) but I think it is also perfectly acceptable to drink by itself. There was a standout sparkling for me, a 100 percent xinomavro Domaine Karanika Brut Cuvee Speciale 2022. So try both - honestly, you won’t regret it.

Oh and these wines are suitable for vegans. Because vegans need wine too. Possibly more than the rest of us..