Lemonia, Primrose Hill
Last time I went to Lemonia was my birthday last year when I revealed the impending existence of this little one to my nearest and dearest. We had a great time and came away thinking we had eaten really good, really authentic Greek food - between us I remember that the kleftiko, souvlaki and the veal chop all featured and were consumed enthusiastically. Having visited again this week, I can only assume that we were so caught up in the excitement of last time that we weren't actually paying much attention to the food. This is perfectly likely, as having made my big announcement we all completely failed to notice that our other friend Sarah was also newly pregnant and secretly pouring all her wine into her husband's glass throughout the afternoon.
I digress. Anyway, I was pretty excited to be going back to Lemonia and Greek food was exactly what I fancied after the four mile walk from my house to Primrose Hill. I started with lountza - slices of smoked, brined pork loin which had been grilled - and it was fine. Not amazing, but tasty nonetheless. Rich had saganaki, which he became obsessed with when we went to Corfu and that pot of hot gooey melty cheese was really the highlight of the meal, but melted cheese is hard to get wrong. As I may have mentioned (!) I'm trying to cut calories a lot at the moment, so I had to ignore the lamby lure of kleftiko and keftedes and go for grilled prawns for my main course (pictured). They were marinated in lemon, olive oil and garlic and then cooked on their charcoal grill, so they were never going to set the world alight but they were perfectly nice. Rich ordered the pork souvlaki which lacked seasoning and had not been cooked on a high enough heat to give it a decent char. We had a Greek salad which could only be called as such in the sense that it had possibly been assembled by a Greek person, who inexplicably used a bag of mixed baby leaves and doused them in French dressing - mmm, mustard, exactly what you want with your feta. Not good. Onto puddings: we asked the advice of our very friendly waiter, who suggested we went for the rice pudding and bourekakia (yoghurty filled pastry) as these were the only ones made on site, the rest are bought in. At least he was honest!
I'm hoping that we just made poor menu choices, as everyone else seems to love it and Lemonia really is a lovely restaurant in terms of staff, atmosphere and all that, but still, I don't think we'll go back in a hurry.