These Greek restaurants showcase the cuisine's dazzling diversity
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Loading... - Lucia Manzo
- 15 Sep 2022
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Making over 200 vine leaves for a cousin's wedding might seem like a tough, repetitive job, but Foula Karambetis sees it differently.
"It's fun," she says. "It's a family get-together and we'd do it all together."
These dolmades-making sessions weren't just a nice way to bond with her relatives, they proved to be good training for her career in hospitality. She opened Klimataria Greek Restaurant in Darwin earlier this year with her husband, Nick Manikaros. The venue's name evokes those memories.
"Klimataria means – you know the stem of the vine leaves, how they grow? That's what it is," Karambetis explains. The grape-inspired name doesn't just hint at the presence of dolmades on their dining tables, it also refers to the Greek wines they pour, too.
"Klimataria means Greek traditional food," she says, explaining the menu's direction.
Although the restaurant is only a few months old, its story goes back more than two decades – when Darwin-born Karambetis first met her husband during a year-long holiday to Greece.
"I was in a little island called Kalymnos, that's where my husband was born. He came for Christmas and that's how I met him."
Manikaros' past, selling seafood at a fish market in Greece, inspires his role at the restaurant today.
"He does all the meats and the seafood side of everything. I do all the traditional Greek food," she says. That includes the traditional sausages he makes with throubi, a mountain herb that's sourced from his homeland because it isn't grown here. People have to scale rocky slopes to find this wild plant, which tastes like a "more richer" oregano, according to Karambetis.
The menu is shaped by his birthplace in other ways, too. "Mermizeli is a salad from Kalymnos," she says. "What's special about that salad is the cheese is handmade. It's called kopanisti."
In fact, her husband produces it, and they complete the zesty salad with herbs, barley bread from Greece, the fresh flavours of tomato, capsicum, onion and a good drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. "Then we top it off with the throubi," Karambetis adds. Read More...
