Kathmandu:

Forget about all those diet books and join the Greek food feast. When you try Greek food, you know you don’t have to dodge the calories, or watch the number of servings. In fact, after going through a full Greek meal, you want to have it all all over again.

The Greek Food Festival at the Hyatt Regency is half-way through and people are eating up the cultural experience, literally. The 15-day festival is serving up different menus on different days.

On February 21, the menu was full of Chef Georgious Vagionas’ signature dishes. It was a menu of 13 appetisers and dishes with three lip-smacking honey desserts, and not once do you think about exercising the next morning.

Starting with a traditional light Greek salad definitely gave the sense of a Greek food festival. Out of all the appetisers, the one that really brings the taste into your mouth is the eggplant stuffed with feta cheese and oregano. The flavour is a familiar one to a Nepali tongue. Another notable appetiser was the shrimp saganaki, which was softly cooked in a sauce of tomatoes and pepper. Though the shrimp was there, you taste the other ingredients mostly.

Now, many Nepali dishes may not have the accented Greek names, but after checking out some of the taste, you will know that they are not too different. The lentil soup, fakes, was very similar to dal, except much, much lighter. This was the only thing that had a hint of Nepali spice in it.

The lamb fricassee and the mousaqka are the two dishes the chef has been getting most favourable reviews for. After having the lamb that was not tender, but extremely juicy, one has to wonder how it is possible to cook meat so lightly.

When describing Greek food, the word ‘light’ is so often used, but there is simply no other way to say how weightless they felt in your mouth. The highlighted dessert was ravani that was soaked in luke warm honey. When you mention honey, picture of the sweetest thing comes to mind, but this honey was not too sweet, if that is possible, it was just perfect. This dessert simply melted away leaving the delicious memory of it.

Greek music complemented the food to get people into the mood, which made up for the absence of any Mediterranean drink.