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Aegean Restaurant
Inexpensive, effective Greek cuisine wins fans in Watertown
BY ROBERT NADEAU

 Aegean Restaurant
(617) 923-7771
640 Arsenal Street, Watertown
Open Mon–Sat, 11 a.m.–10 p.m., and Sun, noon–9 p.m.
AE, Di, MC, Vi
Beer and wine
No valet parking; own parking lot
Street-level access

Yes, you can get a cheeseburger and a Pepsi if you want, but only at lunch. And why would you want to, when real Greek-American food is so tasty, so generously portioned, and so inexpensive here? This could be the family restaurant in My Big Fat Greek Wedding — except that it’s bigger, the staff isn’t all family, you can have a fine dinner without comedy, and things have been somewhat modernized. The space used to be an Italian seafood house, Dino’s Sea Grille, but has been attractively redone in white. It has turquoise details (of course), but also a fine fake fire in the middle of the room and cleaner lines.

Food begins on a contemporary note with a basket of Italian bread, sometimes with some pita, and a pour of olive oil so green and fruity it’s probably Greek. It comes with a sprinkling of feta cheese and black pepper to remove any doubt.

My favorite appetizer is a mesclun salad with lobster ($9.95). The lobster salad is excellent, and the portion could fill two lobster rolls, so it’s not really an appetizer. Much the same could be written — and will be written, right here — about the caesar salad with grilled chicken ($6.95), again because the grilled chicken is so nicely seasoned, and again because this is supper for a lot of people.

As for appetizers proper, well, there are spinach pies ($4.95), crunchy phyllo triangles with lemony filling. There is large and nicely fried calamari ($5.95) with some salad and tartar sauce. Remember tartar sauce? (And a couple of lemon wedges for traditionalists; it was, after all, Greek restaurants that first popularized fried squid in Boston in the 1970s.)

Chicken-egg-lemon soup ($2 at lunch) is very smooth, a little starchy, flavored perhaps too faintly with lemon and chicken, and too strongly with white pepper. Artichokes ($6.95) taste canned, but it’s a large can, served hot with egg-lemon sauce, as well as sliced cucumbers, rather decent off-season tomatoes, and terrific black olives. Something distinctively Hellenic is horta ($5.95), described on the menu as dandelion (actually, it says " Landolines " ) or chicory, but really a much better green broccoli rabe. Our waitress tried to steer us off the horta, saying that she had served it and people said it wasn’t what they had expected. People were disappointed to get broccoli rabe instead of dandelions? Sheesh. I suspect the problem is that they didn’t expect the cold, bitter greens that are horta. A traditional dressing of lemon and olive oil might help, where our platter had mostly lemon. But we are into health these days, and tucked right in.

Dinners bring a choice of soup or salad. The latter is a typical Greek salad with a few mizuno greens added. You will probably want it, since some entrées are otherwise devoid of vegetables. Your starch options are baked rice (rather plain), fried potatoes (not bad at all), or oven-roasted potatoes (somewhat powdery our night, but nicely flavored with lemon).

Baked lamb ($11.95) is a sliced-up shank or two, very delicious meat almost falling off the bone, in a creamier version of the allspice-tomato sauce I associate more with Northern Greece than with the Aegean. At lunch, this sauce is a little odd with shrimp and broccoli on baked rice ($10.95). Broiled salmon ($10.95) is one of the larger pieces of fish served anywhere, with a lot of excellent broccoli as well as potatoes. A vegetable kebab ($9.95) is really broiled, two enormous skewers of broccoli (which does very well as a kebab), tomato, green pepper, and mushrooms. This needs garlic oil, perhaps, or a simple sauce. Shrimp scampi ($14.95) suffered from overdone spaghetti, but was saved by an excellent sauce — which tasted like a rich cheese sauce but did not look creamy at all — and by lots of fine shrimp.

I used a house combination platter ($10.95) at lunch to assess a lot of the menu. This comes with modest slabs of moussaka (interesting use of potato as well as eggplant), pastichio (made with spaghetti here), one of the spinach pies, two stuffed grape leaves (meaty, good-taste-of-the-vine leaves, egg-lemon sauce), and slices of green sausage (lots of coriander seed). All these can be ordered individually, and should be.

The wine list at Aegean Restaurant has commendably cheap house reds from Sutter Home ($3.50 glass/$16 bottle). I remember Sutter Home for inexpensive, brambly zinfandels, but on the strength of glasses of the cabernet sauvignon and the merlot, only the inexpensive description still fits. These wines are clean and drinkable, but have no individual character at all, what wine sellers gently describe as a " vinous " nose. It might help to put them in larger glasses, but it might not. However, one level above, the Greek-made Kouros Nemea ($5.50/$19.50) is equally soft and drinkable, but with a much more interesting aroma of bramble fruits. Some very interesting Greek wines are listed by the bottle only. Coffee and decaf ($1.25) are good, but the restaurant was out of cappuccino on my dinner visit. Tea is available in various bags, but what comes to the table is an uncovered cup of hot water. You might as well drink just that, since the tea won’t brew much at that temperature.

The desserts we tried were impressively inexpensive, but otherwise weak. The best was the baklava ($3.75), rich with honey and ground walnuts. Cheesecake with strawberries ($3.75) was good enough and more than big enough, but galatoboureko ($3.75) — a kind of phyllo-wrapped custard pie — was soggy and dull. Rice pudding ($3.75) wasn’t sweet enough.

The Aegean plays background tapes of Greek pop, and the evening lighting is dim with candles, but it’s a very large room that makes no effort to be really exotic. At an early dinner, the crowd is rather middle-aged, perhaps a reflection on the hearty meat-and-potatoes cuisine, but perhaps simply a display of the wisdom of age. Reservations are taken for parties of four or more, and you will often need one, as the parking lot and restaurant are full even on weeknights. Hearty, good-tasting food like this, served cheap, may not win you a James Beard award, but it does fill the seats.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com

Issue Date: April 17 - 24, 2003
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