Desfina

Greece is the word

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Desfina (617) 868-9098 202 Third Street, East Cambridge Open Mon-Thurs, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri and Sat, 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; and Sun, noon-10 p.m. Bar open until 1 a.m. daily. AE, MC, Visa Full bar Sidewalk-level access Smoking in bar area

You can learn a lot about Greece from the place mats at Desfina. Crowded onto each sheet of crinkly paper are a drawing of the Parthenon, a map of Greece, and a history lesson. "Western Civilization and Democracy were developed by the Ancient Greeks," it says. "Aristotle argued that the earth is round 1800 years before Columbus. Hippocrates was the father of Modern Medicine."

You can learn a lot about Greek food from this book I found in the library: The Foods of Greece, by an Athenian journalist named Aglaia Kremezi. It's a wonderful coffee-table affair that paints a glowing picture of a cuisine of mint and feta and parsley, of roast lamb and eggs and seafood, of fresh cheese and hand-cracked green olives.

You can forget all that stuff, though, when you sit down to dinner at Desfina, a cozy little taverna tucked behind the Cambridge courthouse. There
are only two things you need to know here: one, Greek restaurant food bears only a slight resemblance to country cuisine. And two, at Desfina a man will come to your table and light a piece of cheese on fire.

It's true. Just when you think you've seen every novelty food in the book -- when you've had your fourth purple potato salad, your second ostrich fillet, your third fish-on-a-plank -- well, just then, along comes the waiter at a tiny Greek joint with a cigarette lighter and a slab of fried sheep's-milk cheese doused in 151-proof liquor, and whoof! You're a kid again. The blue fire dances around the plate. The edges of the cheese sear into a guilty pleasure, like the crusty bottom of a fondue pot. The old guys at the bar clap. Desfina isn't exactly going to revolutionize Greek cooking as it's understood in the United States of America, but boy, did it score with that cheese.

It scored with the place mats, too. I now know that there are 100 lipta to the drachma; that the leading manufactured products in Greece are clothing and cigarettes; and that in 1984, when the place mat was probably printed, 59 percent of the Greek population was rural.

Greece is the opposite of America in that those 59 percent probably eat better than the 41 percent who live in cities. In my short experience eating in real live Greece, the rustic cuisine of fresh meats and cheeses and heavily resinated wine is a far tangier, livelier, more interesting thing than the blanded-down cosmopolitan food that Greek restaurants serve to urbanites and foreigners. Aglaia Kremezi, in her book, bemoans what she sees as Greeks' inferiority complex about their food, and this complex seems to have traveled to the US -- just think about the relative dearth of Greek restaurants versus the huge surplus of Greek-owned pizzerias, in which transplanted Hellenes sell Americanized Italian food with posters of Corinth on the wall and maybe a token gyro on the menu.

Desfina, to its credit, does not serve pizza. Its menu is all Greek, and the place has the warmth of a village hangout. Its cooking aims more for comfort than electricity, which makes it disappointing for someone who looks for powerful flavors in Mediterranean food. On the other hand, it's a fun, cheap date for an adventurous person with an unadventurous palate.

As always, there are exceptions. The flaming cheese ($5.95) is extinguished with several squeezes of a cut lemon; the juice adds to the natural zip of the sheep's-milk cheese, and the resulting puddle of lemon and oil makes great bread-mopping. Also profoundly unbland was the skordalia ($3.75), a very smooth dip that tasted so powerfully of raw garlic that the people at our table made a deal: everyone eats it, or no one does.

But beyond that, the Mediterranean liveliness Greek food can achieve -- the interplay of lemon and brine, seafood and olive oil and greens, the land and the hills -- was evident only in snatches. It showed through in a chicken kebab ($7.75), in which moist grilled chunks of chicken were served alongside a bed of rice flavored with tomato paste and, fleetingly, cinnamon. It peeked out of the octopus appetizer ($6.95), a toss of chopped tentacles and parsley and oil, which unfortunately also had a canned-tuna-fish taste (it benefited immeasurably from a few squeezes of lemon). And a hint of the Greek tradition of rich wild-greens pies lurked in the horta, a cold salad of wilted dark greens served alongside an otherwise unremarkable red-snapper special. The horta is also available as an appetizer ($3.75), and although we didn't find it electrifying, it's probably a richer-tasting salad than the traditional iceberg lettuce.

And then there were the dolmades ($5.95), the classic giant stuffed grape leaves. In Middle Eastern restaurants, a finger-size version of these is usually served as an appetizer; in Greek places, they're like virid enchiladas packed with rice and ground lamb, and topped with the thickened egg-lemon sauce called avgolemono. There is something dark and spinachy about a cooked grape leaf, and the package has the aura of comfort food with just a slight jolt of life from the lemon in the sauce.

Beyond that, dinners were unremarkable. The roast lamb ($8.50) looks wonderful in the kitchen -- a big knot of meat netted with vegetables and herbs -- but on the plate, it's just a giant slab of meat served with long, soft slices of roasted yellow potato. I'd certainly recommend this if you like, say, pot roast; it's a lot more flavorful and a wonderful bargain. A dish called "pastichio" ($6.75) is a slice of macaroni pie not dissimilar to moussaka: noodles under ground lamb under béchamel sauce. It was surprisingly sweet, but otherwise seemed underflavored.

You can distinguish the desserts by their toppings: the baklava ($2.25) has a fluffy phyllo-dough top, and the kataifi ($2.25) is topped with a bird's nest of shredded wheat. Underneath each is the same sweet mixture of chopped nuts and pastry. There's a wine and beer menu, and for $4 you can get a glass of retsina, the bizarre result of a historical Greek predilection for mixing pine bark into white wine as a preservative. The version here is fairly mild compared to the stuff you can buy in Greece: it's an off-dry white with a lingering hint of turpentine.

As a neighborhood restaurant, Desfina is easy to like. Among other things, the price/coziness ratio is unmatched; you walk through the front room, with tables and a small warm bar, to sit in a snug booth in back. If you stand outside the windows at night, you can see the neon exterior of the CambridgeSide Galleria several blocks down, but you still feel miles removed from the scoured vastness of a mall. You feel like you're somewhere else. Not Greece, maybe, but somewhere.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.

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