1 Browning St West End
2.5/5
Little Greek was selected as the first scheduled dinner of the year due to couple of factors, my friend was playing down the road at music kafe and I’d heard good things. So 10 people sat down for dinner at 7:30 on a busy Thursday night, the frenetic pace of the evening and the fact that we had such a large group may go some of the way to forgive the sins I’ll describe later on.
To start on something that much like the decor is so benign and mute, I’ll start on the dining environment. As I just said the dining room felt boring and uninspired, giving the place a feeling of everything being placed purely for practicality, admittedly though we were seated right next to the kitchen and front counter. However I do believe this a massive failure as most other Greek restaurants manage to give some sort of cool energy in their dining rooms.
Onto the most important part, the food! This was the sole redeeming feature of the restaurant, as a table we ordered three Platters of food, two of the “Northern Greek” platters consisting of a Variety of Souvlaki, spicy beef patties called “Beeftekia”, pork sausage called “Seftelyes” and some dips and salads, the other platter being an “Aegean Seafood” set which featured a lot of seafood, but I didn’t get to try due to my presence at the opposite end of the table besides little Greek claims to be a restaurant whose dishes are inspired and drawn from northern Greek cooking which clashes with a predominately seafood platter. Couple of problems with the platter though, at any other Greek restaurant an order of dips would naturally come with Pita bread, not at little Greek and while the dips were incredibly good in my opinion (especially a pink one which I have no idea what it’s made of) the lack of pita in the platter is an irritation at best.
The food is of exceptionally high quality especially considering the price and is up there with the best of Greek I have eaten, however and I can’t believe I am saying this, the complete debacle that was the service (both the front staff and the kitchen staff) was nigh dinner destroying with the dishes coming out seemingly at random, raising concerns at the table that our entire meal had come out or not. Not helping was the wait staff where only one person seemed to know what was going on with our table leading to confusion, and questions about our food were treated with rude dismissal to the point of having to ask for bread for the dips at least three times before we received any. The platters for both ends of the table coming out at completely different times as to create a situation where one end of the table had finished their meal as the others waited for the second half of their meal. This is probably the only time where service has negatively impacted on the dining experience for me. I would recommend going back to this place however I think the optimal number is 4 or 5 people not the 10 we had for this dinner.
The Northern Greek Platter cost $65 each and is intended to feed 4 people, however 6 of us ate two platters and felt slightly underwhelmed. The Aegean Seafood Platter costs $80 and feeds 4.
The individual dish menu ranges from approx $5 to $15 with the appetisers in the $8 or less range. There are a variety of vegetarian options available
Little Greek Taverna has a website at www.littlegreektaverna.com.au with a full menu available.
Little Greek Taverna is BYO with a Corkage charge of $2pp
