Herald rating: *
Address: 43 Ponsonby Rd
Ph: (09)360 9911
Open: Dinner seven days
Wine list: A liquor list, really.
Vegetarians: Beware
Watch out for: A conscious waiter.
Bottom line: Neither Greek nor a taverna.
KEY POINTS:
I thought Plato's was open when we went: it was full of diners, and a waitress said the restaurant had been going for a month. But a man who seemed to be in charge assured me that "we are not officially open for a couple of weeks". I have no idea what this meant.
I do know that, when it was open only in the sense that it was serving food and charging people, it was neither a taverna nor Greek. It also featured food and service so lousy that they defy description, but I will do my best.
"It doesn't look like a taverna to me," said my Greek mate Dimitri. He had a point. The word conjures images of simple food plonked on rough tables: the starched linen and high-backed black leather chairs at Plato's are Ponsonby at its most unlaidback, even with the impeccably applied "rough" plasterwork on the pillars.
The ankle-length-aproned waiting staff filled water glasses so conscientiously that we were in danger of drowning but they seemed incapable of anything else. When three of us waved at once we usually managed to attract someone's attention but the two nice bottles of wine we had brought were ignored for 10 minutes before I issued explicit instructions ("Take the corks out of these and bring them back with six wine glasses"). They offer no Greek wines. There are 12 tequilas and a score of Scotches on the bar list but only one ouzo. It is made in Adelaide.
The waitresses were mainly Asian, although this did not dissuade them from correcting Dimitri's Greek pronunciation.
The ambience was provided by a television blaring well-known Greek artists such as Elvis, Johnny Cash and the Bee Gees. The spelling mistakes that littered the menu made Dimitri suspicious as to the establishment's authenticity (it is alleged that a Cypriot owns the place but there was certainly no Greek in the kitchen).
We didn't need Dimitri to tell us the food was dreadful, but he helped with the details.
Among the appetisers, the taramosalata (fish roe dip) tasted like flavoured mayonnaise and the dolmades (rice-stuffed vine leaves) were bland and small. All the main-meal meats were dry and overcooked and none was done in a style Dimitri recognised as Greek. It was more like my mum's cooking on expensive crockery. We could not detect any trace of eggplant in the moussaka (although there was plenty of undercooked potato) but we may have missed it because the lighting is so bad.
We lacked the nerve for dessert.
The man who told us that they weren't open had a completely straight face when he described the restaurant as "raw steel being honed into a fine blade". I forbore to tell him that it seemed more like a rusted coal shovel without a handle. But it set Dimitri off, and he gave the man the benefit of his assessment. The man's response was to ask Dimitri not to raise his voice (he wasn't). He proceeded to tell us that it is very hard to get a Greek chef and Greek ingredients. To which we did not reply - but, I do now - so why would you open a Greek restaurant?
