Introducing the ‘Gastroteca’
Even in the dead of winter, good new things keep happening to New York City. The Underground Gourmet giddily points out a new wine bar, Gottino, that is outpacing its panini-packing rivals. The Insatiable Critic found a new, urbane restaurant in Dovetail and loves the Sunday prix fixe. Among this week’s openings, Periyali adds a midtown sister in Persephone, giving the city another blue-chip Greek restaurant. Ah, New York: Even our lean seasons have their harvests.
Openings
Periyali: New Look, Same Great Taste!
When we heard that Periyali, the much-admired Flatiron Greek restaurant, was closing for a six-week renovation, we wondered if the food would be changing too. After all, the restaurant may have been the final word in high Greek cooking back in the Clinton era, but a wave of superb Greek restaurants including Thalassa, Estiatorio Milos, Molyvos, Onera, and Dona have opened in the intervening years. Would Periyali risk tarnishing their superb menu to adjust? The place reopened this week with new mirrors, a marble bar, and a big mural of Greece, all apparently in hopes of acquiring a younger, hipper crowd. But happily, Periyali is still serving the same very fine, if familiar, moussaka, grilled salmon, grilled lamb chops, and other classics — foods which, as Rob and Robin point out, “can still surprise and beguile with their cultivated polish,” even if the restaurant lacks the up-to-the-minute sex appeal of some of the newer places. We honor Jim Botsacos’s head-on prawns with hot pepper at Molyvos and Michael Psilakis’s sheep’s-milk dumplings with spicy lamb sausage and dandelion greens at Onera. But for a simple rabbit stew, we’ll first visit Periyali — no matter what the bar is made of.
