My wife is Greek American, and we've eaten Greek food - good and bad - from Mytilene to, well, Cathedral City. Since we live in the desert, we were ecstatic to find Santorini, and to read the good reviews. We really wanted this place to...be wonderful.
First, the good: The restaurant is a cute little place, tucked into a shopping center. The waitress was nice to us throughout our meal.
We thought it a little odd that the day's "special," moussaka, was priced the same as the regular moussaka dinner, which was exactly the same meal. Maybe somebody doesn't quite get what a special is, but that's OK. We ordered the lamb gyro plates, reasonably priced, and dolmathes to start - after being assured they were house made.
So, maybe you can fool the general public, but both of us agreed that the dolmathes that arrived did not appear, nor taste, or have the texture of homemade. They very strongly resembled every canned stuffed grape leaf we've ever eaten. I'm not saying they were canned, but if they weren't, whomever was making them back in the kitchen, has done a superb job of making their dolmathes just like the ones in the can.
After that, the gyro plates arrived. The "salad" that arrived with the gyro - chopped lettuce with a couple slices of tomato on top - was clearly long past its prime. The lettuce was browned - not just on a piece or two, but on virtually all of the salad. There's no way whomever was working the kitchen could have put that on our plates and not known it was not acceptable to serve, thus my belief that they just didn't care. At all.
I have my suspicions about the gyro meat as well, as it was the darkest brown gyro meat I've ever seen. Had it been cooked before, and then re-fried for us? It wasn't bad, but again, the gyro came only with a bit of tzattziki and a couple slices of tomato. The gyro flatbread was the best thing about the gyro.
We were disappointed, but we wanted to enjoy our Greek night out as much as possible, so I picked up some dessert (which looked very much like the Philoptichos from our church makes). The waitress, who noted she was not Greek and not from the family that runs the restaurant, gave us one extra piece of loukoumi to make up for our salads (which were not replaced with edible salads, and we were charged full price).
Needless to say, we will never return. It's not a good strategy with a Greek restaurant to provide this inexcusable of a meal to a Greek American and her husband. It's insulting to be served this kind of food, and even more so to have no attempts made at making amends for what was inedible. I've been to other restaurants where they've lied about whether something was house made or not, and even some where they would have been better off serving stuff from a can. But you just don't pile up a bunch of brown lettuce on someone's plate and think you're going to get away with it. Even if the lettuce had been fresh, the salad would have been at best, mediocre. But to serve it the way they did - and then not either replace it, or compensate us for inedible food, was just unacceptable.More
