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Leave room for dessert on Fridays
• by Bill Burge • Photos by Josh Monken
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Nearly two decades ago, a group of Greek Orthodox Christians decided to build a church in Des Peres. Not having enough money to complete the complex in one go, they decided to build in two phases: first, a dining hall and activities building, and then the church itself. When the small congregation lacked the money to move forward on phase two, a plan was hatched to pay for construction and the ensuing mortgage: a weekly luncheon run by parishioners. And Assumption Greek Orthodox Church’s Friday lunches have been going strong ever since.
Basically a gym without basketball courts, the dining hall is packed with dozens of round tables that seat hundreds of local workers enjoying their lunch breaks. The kitchen operates buffet-style, and the menu consists of classics like Greek salad, spanakopita and gyros, along with a revolving selection of two or three entrées and soups, which can be previewed in advance on the church’s Web site. While some dishes are simply OK – a universal lack of salt threatens to make many of the dishes bland – most offenses are quickly corrected with a sprinkle of salt and pepper.
Of the constants, my favorite was dolmathes, aka dolmades or dolma, the classic dish consisting of grape leaves wrapped around a mixture of ground beef and rice. They are tedious to wrap uniformly, and Assumption’s are wrapped perfectly. Lemon juice in the sauce adds a zippy acidity, and a mild saltiness – similar to capers, as grape leaves are also sold brined in jars – enhances the flavor of the extremely moist beef. Spanakopita was also good, with browned phyllo offering a nutty contrast to the gooey spinach and feta mixture within. Gyros, unfortunately, were the one miss. Preassembled to assist with the hurried nature of the busy lunch and the steady stream of to-go orders, they were cold.
During the months that eggplant is available, moussaka alternates biweekly with what has become a staple of modern Greek restaurants: pastitsio. Consisting of a base layer of long macaroni and a sloppy-Joe-like mixture of ground beef and spices, it is topped with béchamel sauce and baked. It’s my wife’s favorite Greek dish, and, traditionally flavored with cinnamon, which you don’t often find in savory foods, we’ve come to love its unusual flavor. Here, the cinnamon flavor is faint “due to complaints,” but the fluffy inch of rich béchamel takes on the nutlike qualities of browned butter and mostly makes up for this shortcoming.
A fish item is also offered each week; on one visit a lemon baked fish was topped with a Greek spice mixture that certainly included oregano, parsley, garlic and paprika. Doused with a generous pour of olive oil, it was flaky and surely the most well-seasoned dish we ate. Avgolémono, a lemon and rice soup, was tangy, smooth and had an almost creamy body from the addition of eggs.
Desserts are the highlight at Assumption, and unless you have an aversion to honey, you’d do best to remember that it’s now March and your resolutions are long behind you. A strong taste of cloves provided a needed contrast to the sometimes cloying baklava; a shredded phyllo version called kataifi, similar in taste, was less interesting without the crispness of the baklava’s layered phyllo. With its familiar texture and spicing of cinnamon and cloves, a Greek walnut cake called karidópita was fantastically reminiscent of carrot cake – well, if you overlook its gooey coating of honey.
It was the final dessert, however, that stole the show. Imagine a flan baked between two layers of flaky phyllo, all topped with a cinnamon- and citrus-scented honey, and you’ll have some idea of what galaktoboúreko tastes like. It’s the sort of dish I call “huggable” because it makes you want to give its creator a squeeze. It made us forget any complaints we had of our lunches, and on each visit we left struggling with our desire to pick up another piece for the road.
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