At a table at Bar Vlaha in Brookline, someone who did not grow up eating Vlach food takes a bite of the wild boar, roasted slowly and served with lemon potatoes. It’s not a dish most people have eaten anywhere, let alone on a Greek menu in Boston. It’s the kind of meat shepherds in the mountains of northern Greece would have hunted and cooked themselves, long before anyone thought to serve it in a dining room across the ocean.
That reaction, the surprise of it, is exactly what Demetri Tsolakis is after. Tsolakis runs six restaurants in Boston under one company, Xenia Greek Hospitality, built from the ground up over the past several years. Every one of them is Greek. That’s not incidental; it’s the whole idea. Each restaurant does something different: one is fast-casual, one is a wine bar, one is built around cocktails and mythology, but none of them looks like a typical Greek restaurant.
Tsolakis avoids the cliches on purpose, and he’s always looking for a new angle. With each restaurant he opens, “there is a story behind it,” he says. Six restaurants, one argument: that Greek food in America has been flattened into a handful of familiar dishes, and that a whole regional cuisine, largely untold in this country, is still waiting to reach an American table.
