Dona Is Dead, Long Live the Haute GreeksThe news that Dona is closing Saturday has us in a dismal mood. Who knows how long it will be until chef Michael Psilakis is back behind his stove? In the meantime — or if you can’t score a reservation at Dona in the next couple of days — we suggest you sample the following dishes at these five remaining temples of Aegean cookery.
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.
