Kri Kri Mezethopoleion - Veg friendly Greek restaurant, CBD

Saturday night I took my mother and mother in law to see Hairspray. For pre theatre dinner, I wanted to find a restaurant as close to the theatre as possible so they would not have to walk far. My trusty smart phone app gave us a list of all the nearby veg friendly restaurants in the Spring/Little Bourke street area and we settled on Kri Kri Mezethopoleion, a greek restaurant on Little Bourke.

The menu looks like it is geared towards diners ordering dishes to share. To that end, they have 2 banquet menus available. The menu sports a large selection of vegetarian items and both banquets have a good number of vegetarian dishes for any vegetarians dining out with omni friends.Since we only had a short time to eat diner before the show started we ordered items straight from the menu. Given the sizes of the portions we received, we probably couldn't have managed a banquet anyway.

My fiance joined us for dinner, and he and I ordered 3 items from the vegetarian menu, that we were also assured were diary and egg free! While there were only 2 of us, we figured we would order 3 dishes since non vegetarians always enjoy trying the veg dishes as well.

We ordered the Tiganita me Skorthalia (Kolokithia) - Fried battered zucchini slices with garlic potato. The zucchini was beautiful, perfectly cooked. I've never had battered zucchini before. While it was a little oily from being fried, this is how I now think it should always be served! 

We also ordered the Patates Sto Fourno - herbed lemon potatoes. Again, these were beautiful. While they look oily in the picture, they were not. They just had a delicious lemony herby glaze.

Finally we ordered theYigantes - Giant white beans in tomato and onion. This had to be my favourite dish. It looks, as my mother said, like your basic baked beans, but the flavour was something else. I don't know what herbs they put in the sauce, but I will be hunting the internet for recipes for greek beans to try and find one that makes something similar to this dish.



Yum!


Kev wanted to order the eggplant dish, but opted not to because it had cheese in, and because I just cannot stand the vile purple rubbery blob that is eggplant. 

Mum loved the chicken skewers she ordered. It must have been seriously garlicky because from my side of the table it smelled like someone had just opened a jar of crushed garlic under my nose. Since too much garlic is still never enough for my mum though the dish was perfect and she was still raving about the food the next day. 

My mother in law ordered a salad off the specials, which I believe was a octopus salad. She also said the food was amazing, however the serve was bigger than you would expect from a salad so she was unable to finish it which she felt rather guilty about. She is always very careful not to waste food.

Since the food came out fairly quickly, we had time for dessert. Kev ordered the yoghurt with seasonal fruit, expecting it would be the least sugary dessert option. He did not realise it was going to be served drizzled with honey. A lot of honey. He just ate around this. When asked how it was he replied 'like yoghurt'. I'm guessing that means it was good???

Mum ordered the baclava. She had never had baclava before and had no idea what to expect. I think she may have built it up to be something more than sweetened nuts and pastry, because she was disappointed. She said it was nice, but not something she would eat again. I am allergic to walnuts so I stayed far far away from this dish... It looked pretty though.

My mother in law tried the Loukoumathes, which were listed on the menu as honey puffs with cinnamon and crushed nuts. I was scared off by the menu listing nuts, so initially wasn't going to try these, and the rest of the dessert menu was dairy, so resigned myself to no dessert. When the Loukoumathes came out to the table however, there was no trace of nuts to be seen, and the waiter said there actually were no nuts in the dish and they were not prepared near the baclava. Since the serving size was huge, my mother in law and I shared this one. They were basically just donut puff balls covered in honey and cinnamon. Nothing really special.

Kri Kri is somewhere I would recommend if you are looking for a vegetarian friendly greek restaurant, the mains were great and got rave reviews all round the table. The service was friendly (the waiter even very politely responded to my mum querying why there was posted written in french on the wall of a greek restaurant), and prompt and waiters were constantly coming to the table to top up or replace the water jug on the table. I would probably skip dessert however next time I go there. While the desserts each seemed fine, being all either dairy or super sweet options, none of them were really my thing.