EVOO Greek Kitchen

EVOO Greek Kitchen organizes its menu around how a table is going to share it. The headings are not appetizers, mains, and sides — they are Spreads, To Start & Share, Sharing Salads, Sharing Sides, From the Grill, Seafood Specialties, and one extended set called the Full Greek Culinary Experience. The architecture decides the meal before the order is in: a Preston Street group sits down, gets steered toward a Trio of Spreads, a hot starter, a grilled board for the centre, and a vegetable to round it out, and the bill scales with how many people came. EVOO has been doing exactly this in Little Italy since 2014.

Tzatziki, tirokafteri, and melitzanosalata anchor the spread program — yogurt with cucumber, whipped feta with chili, charred eggplant with garlic — and the Trio of Spreads delivers all three on one warm-pita order. From the grill the kitchen leans on EVOO Chopped Chicken (citrus, garlic, herbs), Canadian lamb chops worked with lemon and oregano, and pork souvlaki, with a Mixed Grill Board that combines them when the table cannot pick. Seafood runs in parallel — Grilled Mediterranean Octopus, Fried Calamari, EVOO Shrimp, and a Seafood Board for Two — so a four-top can split the centre of the table between meat and shellfish without anyone reaching across. Sides cover the Greek staples (lemon potatoes, Greek salad, spanakopita, keftedes) and the menu makes room for one stretch — a Spicy Ouzo Rigatoni — for a guest who wants pasta on a Greek night out.

The discipline shows in what the kitchen leaves out, not what it includes. The grill, the spreads and the seafood are three small programs the kitchen has decided to do consistently, and the rest of the menu is organized to feed into them rather than around them. Cocktails and a Greek-leaning wine list sit beside the order rather than competing with it. Pricing lands in special-occasion territory — Preston Street takes its food seriously, and the bill reflects that — but the share-plate format does its quiet work on the math: a Trio of Spreads, two grilled boards and a couple of salads across four people reads as one meal, not four entrées, and the per-person number falls accordingly.

Elias and Dean Theodossiou are the owners, and local reporting from EVOO's early years placed the family's restaurant background behind the project: Greek hospitality, generations of family cooking, a decision to translate it into a modern Ottawa dining room rather than a taverna. That is the through-line the menu still carries — the kitchen handles classics like spanakopita and moussaka without reinventing them, and saves the modern work for plating, pacing and the way the order is steered. The "sharing" headings on the page are not a marketing decision; they are the way the family already eats, written down for the rest of the table to follow.

What the format is built for shows up in how it gets booked: reservations are the standard, private dining is on offer, groups and celebrations are explicitly accommodated, and the room handles parties as a primary use rather than an exception. EVOO sits on a stretch of Preston Street whose default cuisine is Italian, and a Greek dining room on that street has had a dozen years to become its own kind of local landmark — the place a working table on the Little Italy strip goes to when the meal has to feed more than three people, has to please both a grill order and a seafood order, and has to start with something a knife can be set down beside. By the time the spreads are wiped down and the grill board is bones, the meal has run the way the menu sketched it at the door.