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Café Athena – Pacific Beach
December 2006
I’m on the fence with Café Athena because of this last visit I had there. I ordered the souvlaki plate with a side of lemon soup (avgolemono). The soup was ok, not really warm enough, but it’s a pretty good mix of lemon juice, egg, and chicken, enough to slip in and give you a little tickle. I have had better, though it was in Cyprus, and I never saw “Gyros” in Cyprus or Greece, maybe I wasn’t looking past the moussaka or other things?
I’m spoiled I guess, but I mean if you are going to make Greek food and charge Café Athena prices for it, you better bring it on.
These guys catered our wedding actually and I would highly recommend them for catering, I think. My guests always bring up the food and always rave about how great it was. Maybe it was because they weren’t eating the usual chicken breast with salty gravy wedding food and were eating hummus. Their staff was excellent too, keeping everything moving well and clean behind the scenes. Being that it was my wedding I had about a bite of food the whole night, in between talks with Uncle Johnny, but their souvlaki skewers that night were excellent.
Here, at the restaurant, their souvlaki skewers were so-so, to say the least. Actually they weren’t good at all. Though they were cooked well, my lunch skewers were too big, meaning that the flavor they were marinating in for whatever time didn’t have enough to soak into the meat. The meat was dry, big pieces of chicken, and actually the flavor of the outside was seared off and blackened, like chewing on a burnt piece of firewood.
I wasn’t sure what kind of rice I ate with it either, it was kind of soft and mushy and really lacked any sort of flavor, even a hint. The dish was served with a side of “Briami,” which was ok, though really tasted like I was eating spaghetti sauce that I was cooking on the stove (which I like doing, dipping bread into, etc.), I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was eating spaghetti sauce on the side. Still to this day actually.
Most Briami has zucchini, eggplant, potatoes and other ingredients. Theirs seemed to only have tomatoes.
Really, nothing about the dish was that Greek, except for their Tzatziki sauce, which I actually liked, though it was also a little bland. I asked for hot sauce also, because I saw they had harissa on the menu, and the guy brought me a bottle of Tapatio that was refridgerated.
My wife ate a gyros sandwich, which she enjoyed, though I suspect that ubiquitous gyros generic meat rather than a home-grown gyro’s rotisserie. I would like to see their kitchen actually, to see if they have a rotisserie, I bet they don’t. Most Greek restaurants don’t, or if they do they have that generic gyros tower that you buy from one wholesaler in Iowa or something. The one gyros meat thing you can get at Jake’s diner, the mall, Greek Fiesta Restaurant or pretty much everywhere, you know, mall gyro.
Go eat mall gyro, punk.
A little first grade web search comes up with: http://www.centralfoodservice.com/gyros.htm, Kronos, out of Chicago, shipping Gyros all over to make one taste, one gyro, one people, world peace.
I always say gyro like “Ji-Ro” just to make people upset or uncomfortable. Give me Ji-ro plate please, and they are like “ok, just keep calm, don’t correct him, he is white, this is America….”
Though who knows how to pronounce it, I read somewhere that Ji-ro is the right way-ish? Most places it’s wrong though. At the malls in New Jersey they have pronunciation keys next to it though: GYRO : “Yee-ro”
Who the fuck cares, just eat it and shut up.
Listen Café Athena I’ll give you a second chance but at the moment you are skating on thin ice. I want small tasty chicken pieces with souvlaki-ness on them, not something I can make at home for 1/9 the price. Give me something even remotely close to the souvlaki sandwiches on Nissi Beach near Ayia Napa, which are made on a grill with no other high-tech cooking crap anywhere nearby.
Give me Greek rice, lemons on the side to put on everything, more than a thimble-ful of Tzatziki, better bread than that thick weird fake-pita-like bread, better service, better everything. Give me something more than Daphne’s Greek Fast Food for Zeus’ sake.
And I want you to make your own Ji-roes on a damn rotisserie.
I don’t know when I’ll be back but when I do that’s what I want otherwise you are getting a foot up your bouzouki and I will never come back to your restaurant again in my life.
Café Athena
1846 Garnet Ave.
San Diego, California
(858) 274-1140
http://www.cafeathena.com/
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