Kouzina does a couple of really good ideas reasonably well. The first good idea is to build a bistro around the flavors of Greece. The risk is that there are a lot of diners and luncheonettes and modest Greek-American restaurants that also feature lamb, feta cheese, spinach pie, kalamata olives, eggplant, and garlic. But the payoff is that hardly anyone with a serious background in French and New American cheffery, like Kouzina chef Nelson Cognac (formerly of Harvest), has looked over the Greek menu in a long time. Not all of Cognac’s Neo-Greco cuisine reaches the Platonic ideal, but it’s all fun, and some dishes sing in both ancient and modern modes.
The other good idea is to hedge with high-quality Italian food. That way, your pizza menu doubles your appetizer menu, and your side dishes ($4–$6) are also the children’s menu. And that means you have a suburban bistro to which diners can bring their kids, even teenagers. You risk losing the romantic-couple trade (although the food is romantic), but you’ve got a really flexible place for lunch.
The space, in a converted bakery, is small and inevitably somewhat crowded with 40 seats. On cold nights, a draft slides past the curtained entry. The décor is more fun than fancy, typified by a twin-engine ceiling fan that looks like it was made out of spare parts of a B-24 bomber. The rest falls nicely between pizza parlor and bistro, with a tile floor in pastels, Matisse-maroon-painted wainscoting, chrome-yellow walls, and seating in several colors, including one in crashing red. The wall art is old windows with mirrors on one wall, colored glass on the other. Out front is a flag of a pineapple, a symbol of neither Greece nor Italy, but of hospitality. No pineapple on the menu, either.
Food at dinner or lunch begins with a serious breadbasket: baguette, focaccia, and a grilled flatbread. The dip is olive oil, with an onion-tomato " tapenade " that packs the taste wallop of a chutney. Appetizers can be as informal as one of the eight pizzas. We split a " Constantinople, " a meld of shredded chicken, pine nuts, and white cheese that needed a little more sage to be a real standout, but had a fine, thin crust. At lunch these pizzas can be folded over (literally) into calzones, giving them the appearance of grilled pita pockets. We had a special ($8) that ought to go on the regular menu: chicken, portobello mushrooms, spinach, and gorgonzola cheese. The powerful blue-cheese flavor pulls together all the others and brings out the full woodsiness of the mushrooms especially well.
Or one can have a real bistro appetizer like " codfish cakes with potato gratin and fried garlic " ($9). They are made like crab cakes but have a lot more flavor, with salt-cod nuggets barely held together with sauce and potatoes. Each has a bit of crème fraîche on top, although the plate is nearly stolen by the broiled grape tomatoes scattered around, with little French-fry-like toes of fried garlic (these are more harmless than they sound). The only problem with this plate is a potato cake held together with strong cheese — the problem is the cheese, which might be okay on its own, but doesn’t go with anything else here. " Baby spinach with crispy calamari and pancetta " ($7) is a nice spin on fried squid, with the seafood crisp and dry, the salad crisp and bland, and an onion jam tying both together.
A third approach would be to appetize with side dishes, such as " Julie’s inspired angel-hair pasta with butter " ($5), which is simple and delicious. The pasta is freshly made and perfect, with inspiring plain butter. Macaroni and cheese ($5) is quite good also, served scalding hot and rich with white cheese. It’s too filling for an appetizer, however, and perhaps even too filling for a side dish. But it’s also too good just for kids.
Among the entrées, the inspired choice is the grilled lamb chops ($22). The lamb is delectable and cooked to order. The two thick chops are arranged in a row, with the center being a spinach pie as only a trained chef could re-create one. This is layered phyllo, like a napoleon, and topped with a dill sauce that looks like a cream sauce, but has the texture of a skordalia (garlic-potato mayonnaise). A special on Cornish game hen ($18) was cleverly boned and flattened, wonderfully roasted, dusted with oregano, and served over a stuffing of currants, pine nuts, chard, and croutons made sweet and sour like an ancient Mediterranean sauce.
Shrimp-and-lobster cannelloni kakavia ($21 dinner/$16 lunch) is likewise full of flavor. The tubes of pasta are filled with plenty of seafood and bound with cheese, but the great merit of the dish is that it is served in a tomato-soup sauce that tastes like a long-cooked seafood stew. " Roasted hanger steak ‘daube’ style with garlic whipped potatoes " ($16) is a bistro dish, but ours was stuck between two ideas. Either you marinate this steak and grill it quickly (and marinating makes it cook even faster), or you braise it until it falls apart. Our beef was sliced thickly, but overdone by the first plan and underdone by the second. Thus, it was tough and dry. Given the delicious carrots and sauce, I would suggest continuing with the braising plan. And the mashed potatoes were excellent.
The wine list at Kouzina is short, but it’s interesting and well selected for the food. If you are having only a glass, there’s little reason to look beyond the first red on the list, a Greek-made St. George by Skouras ($5 glass/$24 bottle). Greek winemaking has come a long way, and this is a bone-dry red with some ripe-cherry fruit and a clean, slightly astringent finish. There isn’t a lot of acidity, but you couldn’t match better with any of the above dishes, including the seafood cannelloni.
Desserts are very bistro, and very good in that homey way. The star is apricot-cherry-brioche bread pudding ($7), which comes to the table as a nice square of cake-like pudding, topped with real whipped cream, but quickly gets messed up into rich and delicious spoonfuls. Chocolate pot de crème ($7) is right up there, really just a very glorified chocolate pudding, but so full of bittersweet chocolate it will addict even very-adult palates. It comes with a wonderful meringue cookie, as does the crème caramel, a perfect flan. Service at Kouzina is good, with some pauses when the room is full, which is often.
Is it a bistro? Is it a family restaurant? What is a trained chef doing with Greek dishes out in Waban? Well, making some neat dinners where the kids can have a pizza or pasta entrée, and the gourmets can bliss out on codfish cakes, grilled lamb chops, seafood cannelloni, a great bread pudding, and a chocolate pot de crème to end ’em all.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com
