Katerina’s Greek Cuisine – Manassas

I am not what you could describe as an adventurous eater.  In fact, for most of my formative years, I considered lettuce to be a food stuff to be avoided.  Garlic?  Ha!  Would not touch the stuff.  Now part of that is the environment I grew up in and certainly at school I was not exposed to things that generally are considered flavourful.  But thanks to a friend, I was introduced to Greek food (specifically gyros) before I learned about a taco (no, I am not kidding).  Since then I have forced myself to try new and different foods.  I am still not hot on things like eggplant and you can keep your broccoli, even if it is covered in soy sauce.  But I still like a good gyro, and I am generally willing to dive into most Greek foods.

So, this weekend, as part of our no chicken fingers pledge while the Elf is at camp, we went to dinner at a new Greek restaurant in Manassas called Katerina's Greek Cuisine.  Now we like to patronize our local restaurants. Most are family run, tasty and offer a good deal and Katerina's is certainly a fit in all three.  The portions were healthy and we left after three courses for under $50.  Of course, that was without wine (they are still waiting their ABC permit) and as you know we both like wine.  I am hoping they have a good selection of Greek wine when they finally get their license.

It was a wonderful dinner.  We started with Saganaki, which is Kaseri cheese flambéed at the table, and it was very tasty - you squeeze some lemon juice on it which really makes wonderful.  I had a gyro platter with lamb (it is the only time I will eat lamb) and found out that pork is the traditional Greek way of making a gyro and the chef graciously gave me a small sample of it.  It is very different if you are used to the lamb version.  The pork was light and floral rather than the spicy lamb I am used to and I will certainly give a try next time around.  My wife had a selection of spreads, and other than the hummus, I cannot tell you what they were, other than very tasty as well.  One of the ones we had was lots of feta, garlic, some sun roasted tomatoes and a couple of other things tossed it - it was very tasty and our favourite of the bunch.  We wanted the rice pudding for dessert, but they were out, so we had the Galaktoboureko –  a creamy baked custard and filo dough drenched in lemon & orange infused syrup. I highly recommend it!

I give it five stars.  The food is good, the atmosphere is friendly and you want to go early, because it only has a handful of tables and when we left at 6:30, it was already full.