Telephone: 020 7836 3177
Address: New Rodos, 59 St Giles High Street, London WC2.
Dinner for two, including wine and service, £50 - if you try really hard.
It is in the nature of this column to fetishise the new. As a result, like the Queen on her royal visits, I am in serious danger of assuming that all restaurants smell of fresh paint. I decided the time had come, therefore, to flush out my nostrils and visit somewhere that had not smelled of fresh paint in a very long time.
My friend Robert, himself a restaurateur, directed me to Rodos, a Greek place just off London's Tottenham Court Road in the glowering shadow of Centre Point.
It is one of those restaurants that critics would rarely think of visiting, simply because it has been doing what it does for so very long that, like death, taxes and Esther Rantzen's teeth, it has become a fact of life.
We all know of a place like Rodos. It may not be a Greek. It might be an Italian or an Indian or a Chinese. It has simply been there for as long as we can remember, doing the same thing year in year out. It always seems to have a few punters at its table. We do not question its presence, although we might notice if it disappeared.
There is generally only one reason why it has survived for so long: it is very good at what it does. Rodos, Robert said, has been very good at what it does for three decades. There is nothing startling about the food. It comes straight from the Greek - or to be more exact, Greek Cypriot - textbook. That, for me, is a plus. The strain of Greek food we get in Britain - a hangover from this country's enduring involvement in Cyprus - may not be subtle but it has a solid, rustic appeal that soothes the soul.
Rodos is a small and, what might politely be called, rough-and-ready place. A third of the room is taken over by the open kitchen, leaving just enough space for about 20 diners. On one wall is a lurid Grecian mural, executed by an enthusiastic hand. On the other are a few photographs, mostly of the original owner Loukis Savvides - a legend in everyone else's dinner time - with his arm around favoured guests. Dustin Hoffman came here often, a few year's back, when he was playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice round the corner, so he takes pride of place, but Loukis has never been overly impressed by celebrity. Famously, he once refused Uma Thurman entry because he couldn't be bothered to cook any more that night.
These days it is run by his son, Aleccos, and it has been renamed New Rodos. According to Robert, Aleccos is as good a chef as his old man, and I have no reason to doubt him.
The menu takes in all the usual suspects, but it is not really worth looking at. Just order the meze, a huge assault course for £17.75, which many have started and few have finished. (A Loukis story: one evening a table of eight ordered the meze. Loukis asked if any of them were vegetarians. Three said they were. He asked if any of those didn't eat fish. One of them said they didn't. He asked her if she ate cheese. No, she said, she didn't eat cheese. He looked at her. 'Why you come to my fucking restaurant then?' A good question, no?)
We ordered just the meze starters at £11, and that was enough in itself. Here taramasalata is soft and mellow and distinctly pale, unlike the acidic Day-Glo pink stuff that usually masquerades under the name. Likewise, the tzatziki is garlicky but not overwhelmingly so.
There was a rustling plate of crisp,spicy whitebait and extraordinarily tender slabs of squid in a rich red-wine sauce. Huge king prawns came either wrapped in filo pastry or in a sharp tomato and garlic sauce.
And no, I haven't finished yet. There were also dense dolmades - vine leaves stuffed with rice and minced lamb - the size of church candles and a hot stew of peppers, a nutty hummus and a rich aubergine purée.
There was only one down-note. The tahini - a thick paste made from sesame seeds - may have been terrific, but I have always hated the stuff and this didn't change my mind.
Normally, in the full meze, all of this is followed by great slabs of grilled meat, but Robert had concluded that, despite being premiership eaters, we wouldn't be able to do it justice. Few can.
They still talk in hushed, respectful tones of the man who ate the full meze at lunch and then came back to do it again at dinner. Instead, Robert ordered a portion of moussaka for us to share which, in its dense simplicity, reminded me why it is so much a classic it has become a cliché. There was also some crisp calamari and a fabulous dish of black-eyed beans and spinach with lots of lemon juice and oil. With this we drank musky bottles of retsina and a crisp, white Santorini.
It should be said that the black-eyed beans are not on the menu. Quite a lot of things aren't. You just have to phone up and ask them to sort you out.
They'll roast you a whole suckling pig if you can drum up enough people to eat it, and they have a good seafood supplier for crab and lobster.
It's that kind of place. No posturing. No desperate attempts at needless innovation. Just good food cooked the way it always has been.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
