Forget the usual blue and white restaurants to eat feta salad. Contemporary Greek cuisine is another and you eat it from Vasiliki Kouzina: a beautiful, elegant restaurant, where appetizers never seem to end
Souvlaki and tzatziki. There Greek cuisine it is too often reduced to fast food stereotypes and to some faded memories of beach holidays. It is true however that Greek restaurants in Milan have never been a gastronomic revelation and that very often they have been reduced to serving salad with feta, kebab and little else. Not from Vasiliki Kouzina.
No cliché of Greece
Vasiliki Pierrakea is Greek, from Kalamata, the city of black olives and arrives in Italy by chance. She has a past as a cook at home and in 2016 she opened the doors of her restaurant in Via Clusone 6, in Milan. Vasiliki Kouzina has nothing of the cliché of Greek restaurants, all white and blue, in fact it is red, red, like Vasiliki's red kitchen from which it all began. It is so beautiful theinterior design that the place is finished in all the furniture magazines, praised for the style and passed a little on the sly for the gastronomic aspect. But it is not true that in the too beautiful places you eat badly: sitting in what looks like a very Milanese living room, all velvet, gold and mirrors, you taste a Hellenic cuisine made of classic old recipes, together with intimate and familiar dishes, contemporary and Mediterranean. The cuisine is refined, the search for exceptional raw materials, the wine list dedicated only to Greek wines worthy of an amateur.
For appetizer lovers to share
There are the simple dishes and flavors of Greek cuisine that we think we know, but there is also research and innovation, contamination and inspiration, to give life to completely authentic dishes. The memory is combined with current events and the flavors from the Balkan and Ottoman world are presented in a way that does not pay homage to the tradition in a didactic way. One begins dutifully with a Plistia, a cutting board with tastings that tell the Hellenic culinary tradition: melitzanosalata (eggplant cream, light and smoked), tzatziki with Karagiannis yogurt, Taramas (salted fish egg sauce), mavres elies Kalamon (black olives from Kalamata), steaming pita (€ 18 for two people). Then continue with the appetizers, omezedes, which are the beauty of the menu: chickpeas and bottarga, cauliflower with lemon, zucchini balls with mint, saganaki mussels with ouzo and feta from Sparta …
Lightness and substance
The kitchen has a vegetable prevalence that appeals to women, and in fact they crowd the room alone or in pairs. Because the vegetables here have character, the salads have nothing private and you get up happy. For men who think there is no satisfaction for them, there is also one on the menu delicious moussaka, made with baked aubergines, light meat sauce and yogurt béchamel, one hortopita (savory pie wild herbs, leeks and basil), a gyros of lamb served with mint, tzatziki, baked tomatoes and crispy pita and an excellent honey octopus. For eating lunch with two menus, at € 25 or € 35, and at dinner ordering à la carte, you are around € 40 excluding wines; that for Milan is the price of any restaurant. Without doubt the best restaurant of Greek cuisine in Milan. Perhaps, in his being creative and nonconformist, even the most genuine.
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