Kafeneon

Review

... is like the blood of the earth

The extent to which local cuisines serve as a patriotic identity marker can be seen not least in how readily and quickly other cuisines are discredited. By standardizing China's culinary cultures as sweet and sour glutamate lumps, recognizing French cuisine as butter-heavy, having nothing but derision for English cuisine and deeming Greek cuisine - reduced to gyros and tsatziki - as unworthy.
So it was all the more courageous when two women - a Greece enthusiast and a Greek cook - opened a small restaurant on Yppenplatz nine years ago. At Kafeneon, you could get what you would never get at a Greek restaurant, such as spetzofai, kritamo or tsitsiravla, which was great, but didn't last very long. A Greek chef took over and cooked something not quite as eccentric, but also extremely good, authentic and different from the usual Greek food, which is why Alexander and Kias Burget decided to have him cook for their wedding. One is a former gambling manager, the other a former ballet dancer from Brasilia, and both have been running the wonderful Kias in Gumpendorfer Strasse for four years. Kias says that the quality of the Kafeneon has declined a little recently, but he offered his support and eventually came home with a new restaurant. Alexander Burget was probably not wrong either. After all, he is half-Greek and seems extremely happy as the host of the Kafeneon, which opened last week. The current menu is reminiscent of the last menu, i.e. Greek home cooking at a high level, but has now been given an additional finesse by Kias, which is to be maintained in future by a chef from Lesbos, who also used to cook at Filippou.
Fava bean puree with caramelized onions and figs: divine (€ 9.50), "Afrata Salata", a salad of black-eyed beans, dried tomatoes, herbs and smoked herring, very salty, very intense, very good (€ 10.50), and with Garides Saganaki the wonderful proof that the dogma that seafood should not be combined with cheese is garbage: Prawns with feta in paradeis sauce, old Swede, that's good (€ 12.50).
The organic Cretan lamb, cooked for hours in olive oil using the confit method by Kias Burget, is also delicious, especially with the accompanying bowl of melanzani salad (€ 25.90). The wine list is bursting with products from over 300 indigenous Greek grape varieties - certainly not the cheapest Greek restaurant in town, but one of the best. Greek cuisine does what it does incredibly well here: make you happy. The best ingredients, delicious recipes, wonderfully cooked.

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