Greek Food Festival

A quick search of the blog would suggest that I have never blogged about St. Nick's Greek Food Festival before, which is both a travesty and perhaps the reason we don't get more visitors in May. Just around the corner from my department is this big Greek Orthodox Church, St. Nicholas. Mom and Dad stopped there once for a luncheon during the ordination, but they completely missed the lines threading around the hall, out the building and up the street that are so essential to this Greek Food Festival.

Dad has told us stories of how Nana used to expose the family to culture by taking the kids to all the church dinners- the Swedish meatballs, an the Italian spaghetti and the horror of the pancit noodles that looked too much like worms. This church dinner is nothing like that. St. Nick's, being well endowed with Greek people, and Greek appreciating people, makes a once a year fund raising bonanza, opening their doors and kitchens for reasonably prized Greek food. There is a Gyro tent outside, tables full of pastries piled high with mountains of baklava and long buffets of Greek classics. This is where I developed my affection for tiropita- like spanikopita, it's a casserole made with layers of filo dough, but the filling is just cheese- not even diluted by creamy spinach like its near cousin. They've got Greek wine, and will even make you a baklava sundae. The festival is open all week, serving lunch and dinner- so you can imagine that I've been there 3 times already, brought home leftovers for Matt twice and am still keeping my options for tomorrow open.

St. Nick's is a great host, there are cheery church volunteers hefting industrial pans of moussaka and pastitio into the various make shift kitchens. The shockingly long lines move quickly, and before you know it, you've got a armload of loukamades (fried honey balls), souvlakia (lamb kababs) and dolmathes (stuffed grape leaves). The city is happy to turn out in force to support the event, not because there are so many lapsed orthodox folks, but because despite many Mediterranean restaurants, there is very limited truly Greek food in town. The only way for the kalamata deprived masses to get their fill is to visit one of the regions many Greek Orthodox food festivals, of which St. Nick's is the biggest and arguably best.