Air canada enRoute Magazine : 2010-11-1
Our Big Fat Greek Food Odyssey
GQ : 2002-11-1
The Man Who Devoured 55th Street
GOURMET : 2002-5-1
Grecian Yearn
WINE SPECTATOR : 1998-4-30
Hooked on Freshness
Our Big Fat Greek Food Odyssey
On a culinary tour of Olympic proportions, two guys prove that there’s more to Greek cuisine than meat on a stick.
A story by Alan Richman
The grizzled Greek in the faded undershirt ambles ominously toward our table on a cobblestone pedestrian lane in Athens, the floodlit Acropolis beaming high overhead. He looks desperate. His clothes look worse. I figure the guy is homeless or, this being Greece, a tax evader, and has taken to stalking innocent tourists caught with their hands wrapped around souvlaki sandwiches.
Read the full story.
GQ November 2002.The man who devoured 55th Street
River to river, there are forty-six restaurants on this busy Manhattan crosstown street. To eat at each of them - some more than once - seems a fool's errand, but that didn't stop our hungry critic.
By Alan Richman
The only meal on 55th Street that approached perfection was at Milos, the upscale equivalent of a Greek seaside spot patronized by yachtsmen rowed ashore in their yawls. The fish were on ice, and when I looked at them, they looked back as if to say, " You can't afford me." My pageot, a snapper, went for almost $70. It was gently grilled with a touch of olive oil and lemon juice and exhibited the fragrant softness so prized in Mediterranean cuisine.
Side dishes are extra, but they're worth the cost, particularly the grilled eggplant and zucchini and a dessert of the creamiest possible yogurt topped with the richest possible honey. Milos is everything Greek restaurants that try to extend their moussaka with extra flour are not. The owner is Costas Spiliadis, who opened the first Milos in Montreal and came to New York five years ago. The 55th Street restaurant is more spacious and elegant than the original, but the fish on ice, the exposed ductwork and the wide-plank flooring are nearly identical.
GOURMET May 2002 Grecian Yearn
There's a chorus of decent grilled-fish restaurants in town, but Estiatorio Milos makes its seafood sing like Callas.
By Jonathan Gold.
They share certain things in common, Manhattan’s new Greek palaces of fish: the displays of fresh vegetables still tucked into their cardboard crates, the sharp perfume of garlic and burning hardwood, the flowing streams of cold Santorini wine. Curling, charred octopus tentacles are on some of the tables and grilled peppers with oil on others, bowls filled with the emulsified carp roe dip called taramosalata and the garlicky yogurt called tsatsiki, hunks of grilled pita and wads of horta (steamed greens), fried calamari and charcoal-broiled shrimp drizzled with oil, yogurt with honey, and of course, grilled fish. At the center of the restaurant, like frigid shrines to Poseidon, are squat, open fish counters – elaborate, multitiered affairs where seafood is arranged on beds of ice by species and point of origin, with live langoustines and lobsters and such, protected from the snowy depths by a layer of straw. A couple of months ago, I became obsessed by this new generation of fish restaurants, obsessed with the quick codification of the cuisine, the idea that it was possible to get pretty much the same meal at any of a half dozen restaurant, varying in price and in quality but never in form. Then I stopped by Estiatorio Milos, the spectacularly successful midtown restaurant whose arrival from Montreal spawned this legion of imitators, and I realized that what I had been doing was like trying to figure out Madonna by listening to Britney Spears. If your idea of Greek restaurant dining has anything to do with either happy summers in Mykonos or dripping take-out shawarmas in Queens, Estiatorio Milos may come as a shock, looming off its stretch of 55th Street like the entrance to a handsome merchant bank, unannounced but for a tasteful steel sign and a massive antique urn. Inside, bare, brutalist, gray concrete walls rise nearly 30 feet into the air. A gauzy scrim between the bar and the dining room, big enough to conceal the stage next door at City Center, is weighted with purpling cloves of garlic.These are not party Greeks, you understand – no plates tossed into fireplaces, no Nana Mouskouri records, no irascible-yet-lovable waiter named Spyros who insists on feeding you the first bite of moussaka himself. (In fact, there is no moussaka.) Sometimes, it seems as if Milos commissioned a de-kitsching consultant to burn the Parthenon posters and trash the bouzouki CDs, because all that decorates the room are a few old lobster traps that look oddly like Joseph Beuys sculptures in the spare, gallery-like environment, a photograph of a gnarled olive tree, and what could be a vague architectural allusion to the bleached hillsides of Plaka.
But they are as beautiful as they are fearsomely priced, Milos’s Greek fish, all pinky and gold, flecked with silver, striped, spotted, and plain, clear of eye and brilliantly complected, their markings so startlingly crisp that the fish seem somehow more than real, like a hologram, or an object somebody paid $7,500 to have airbrushed onto the side of a yacht. It seems miraculous that these fish have traveled from the Aegean to Manhattan almost as quickly as they might have to the charcoal grills of Athens or Mykonos.You choose a fish, a big Saint-Pierre, perhaps, or a salty-fleshed Mediterranean porgy, or, best of all, the glistening Greek snapper called pageot, and it is taken off to the kitchen to be grilled. (“The owner knows all the fishermen as well as I know my children,” one waiter claimed.) Minutes later, the fish returns, split and stripped of its bones, folded open, moistened with olive oil, and sprinkled with freshly snipped herbs.The skin will be crisp – it is always crisp – and the flesh will be thoroughly, but only, cooked through. The flavors are salt, strong oil, a faint tang of smoke, the sea. Milos’s cooking is food that glories in its nakedness, basks in its simplicity, dares to be that restaurant on the beach, that village taverna where you seem to taste food as if for the very first time – a trick that is a lot harder to pull off in midtown Manhattan than it is in the hills of Lesbos.
You could approach Milos as a mathematical construct: Every constituent part of the fish course is presented without compromise, not just the fish but the peppery olive oil the restaurant imports, the elegant leaf-shaped platters on which the fillets are served, the procedure for separating and serving the head of a larger sea beast, if you are the kind of person whose well-being depends on the ability to dig out the flawless nugget of meat from each cheek. Should there be five of you at the table, the waiter will divide a large fish according to a geometric formula that I am willing to bet ends up being precise within milligrams.The specially imported capers, half a dozen per serving, are of a vivid, clean flavor.Owner Costas Spiliadis, who also still runs his original Estiatorio Milos, in Montreal, even brings in his own salt, flaky, crunchy stuff with the consistency of new snow, harvested in the traditional manner on the island of Kithira.I would not be surprised to learn that the lemons were grown near Phylakope from a particular Cypriot seed, or that the hardwood for the charcoal was gathered only by the light of the new moon. Milos serves a dish not unlike the fried zucchini and eggplant appetizer on the menu of every other Greek restaurant in town, but theirs is so much thinner and crisper and utterly free of oil that it is a different species. The kitchen calls it the Milos Special, charges a massive $20.50 for it, and manages to land an order on almost every table. At lunchtime there is kakavia, a golden, perfectly emulsified soup of fish and good olive oil that may be the closest thing there is to a great bouillabaisse in Manhattan.
It’s not all good news. The restaurant is also proud of its hothouse peppers and its off-season tomato salad. It must be said that a tomato in February is a tomato in February whether it costs $16 per order or not. The highly touted fruit plate features the sort of produce you might have seen garnishing your chicken salad sandwich back at the Acropolis Diner. But for at least a couple of minutes at a time, I can persuade myself that I love Milos beyond distraction, that the taste of the fish and the sea and the salt is an objective correlative strong enough to transform the concrete bunker, the silly canvas umbrellas, the sea of hand-tailored suits and expense account vouchers, into a seaside village. And the simplest possible dessert, a big spoonful of thick goat’s-milk yogurt with a few drops of thyme-scented honey, is as exquisite as a classical Greek kouros. Of course, this simplicity comes at a price. When I was younger, I once wrote about urban rustic cuisine, in which the hard bread, green oil, and rough wine that sustained impoverished Mediterranean peasants had suddenly begun to sustain media lawyers and banking tycoons. And Milos is, if anything, even more extreme. Is $100 a person too much to pay for the perfection of a simple meal?
WINE SPECTATOR April 30, 1998Hooked on Freshness
Simple preparations of high quality fish make Estiatorio Milos a serious seafood destination.
Estiatorio Milos is a seafood restaurant for people who like steak houses. Take the freshest fish possible, add fire and serve. The formula is simple, but the results are pure, intense and satisfying. Greece is the inspiration here, but Milos avoids traditional dishes and taverna décor. It takes a more essentialist approach: The idea is to get to the heart of the Greek experience, as if a fisherman built a fire on the beach to grill his day’s catch, adding only the wild herbs and homemade olive oil he had at hand. The concept is saved from banality by the extraordinary quality of the raw ingredients and the impeccable execution of the simple dishes.
The raw material and the cooking are the responsibility – and the passion – of chef-owner Costas Spiliadis. Born in Greece, Spiliadis immigrated to New York at 19 to study sociology, then moved on to Montreal. He opened a nightclub, then started cooking for his customers. In 1980 that club turned into the first Milos. Spiliadis was so intent on quality that he would drive down to New York’s Fulton Fish Market three times a week, pick out his fish, pack them in the trunk and drive back. His efforts won Milos praise as Montreal’s best fish restaurant. Now Spiliadis is closer to the source. New York’s Milos is sprawling, soaring space that doesn’t hide its urban, industrial character but somehow becomes “antique” and “Greek” through the addition of key symbolic elements: amphorae, baskets of garlic and fruit, fragments of stone columns. The focus of the dining room is the “fish market”, where whole fish lie on crushed ice piled in gleaming white marble bins. Customers are invited to pick their own favorites from offerings that range from Icelandic arctic char to Florida red snapper to Dover sole to Sargos from Greece.I have rarely seen such a beautiful display.
The fish are split, cleaned, grilled to perfection, drizzled with fruity yet delicate Greek olive oil, sprinkled with herbs and served, hot and succulent. Side dishes might include horta (steamed greens with lemon), Greek yellow fava beans pureed with dill, shallots and capers, or salads. Fore those who want a bit more culinary elaboration, there is spetsiota, fish baked in a clay pot with tomatoes, fingerling potatoes, red peppers and a light fish broth; charcoal-grilled lamb and beef are also available upon request.
The wine list doesn’t try to overwhelm this basically simple food. Its 100 selections range widely across Europe and America, emphasizing whites and lighter reds appropriate to the cuisine; the list tops out at $165 for a Louis Latour Corton-Charlemagne 1994. However, responding to customer demand for more choices.