If you are like me, after a long week at work and Friday comes around you just can’t be bothered cooking. So this week, when Friday rolled around and I suggested that we go out for dinner.
One of the best things about living in Adelaide is that our options to dine are plentiful, so we decided to go somewhere we hadn’t been before. The only other conditions that we set, was that it had to be casual, easy and someplace local. That way we didn’t have to worry about our travel distance. With this in mind we headed to Port Adelaide to try El Greco for some of their wood oven pizza, which I have heard about from some work colleagues.
Over the past ten years, historical Port Adelaide has been trying to recapture its commercial glories of the past. This promotion of its historic significance by the Port Adelaide Enfield Council, has encouraged many new businesses to take up residence in the many empty buildings. El Greco, is one of those relatively new businesses that is calling Port Adelaide its home.
El Greco is situated at the lighthouse wharf end of Commercial Rd, near two of Port Adelaide’s more popular pubs the Lighthouse Inn and the First Commercial Inn. When you first walk up to the restaurant, it looks more like a fast food outlet. They have pictures of their popular dishes attached to the windows. A Golden North ice cream fridge is located at the front of store, for those weekend visitors on their way to or from the dolphin cruise berths. From the exterior, you wouldn’t class El Greco as a fine dining restaurant. It is more of a casual dining experience with some indoor and al fresco table placements.
Being a cooler winter evening we decided to sit inside, away from the front doors and the sudden bursts of cold air as other patrons entered. The interior decor of the restaurant is comfortable, but mismatched. They have an unusual interior design as they have divided the interior of the restaurant into two areas. One half, has leather style seats that you would find in many fine dining restaurants and the other side, which we are sitting in, was suited to a more casual dining area with wooden seats. Another feature of El Greco is they also cater for takeaway and home delivery customers. So in my honest opinion, I believe they just don’t know what type of restaurant they want to be. A fine dining restaurant, a casual restaurant or a takeaway delivery store.
Being still fairly early, we decided we wouldn’t have a huge meal, instead opting for some garlic bread with tzatziki, and one of their gourmet 12″ wood oven pizzas, the Zorba. The Zorba is a tomato based pizza with, cheese, lamb yiros meat, onions, fresh tomatoes, oregano, garlic, grilled capsicum and feta, topped with tzatziki sauce.
The garlic bread arrives pretty quickly with three large slices of fresh crusted bread lavished in garlic butter and flakes of parsley leaf. In the middle of the plate is also a bowl of homemade tzatziki, that has a smooth creamy texture full of flavour.
Quite happy with the garlic bread, it isn’t too long before our wood oven pizza arrives and it is visual treat, it is lavishly topped with fresh tomato slices, large chunks of yiros meat and full dollops of tzatziki sauce. The aroma given off is mouth-watering. The pizza base is well made with that thin crust that crunches with every bite. The El Greco’s Zorba is a wonderful pizza, cooked perfectly in their classic wood oven.
El Greco’s menu is not large, they have a good variety of traditional and gourmet pizzas with prices between AUD$13 and AUD$22, they also have a small selection of pasta dishes and schnitzels also between AUD$15 and AUD$22. Their wine selection is pretty standard with a few red and white choices that are available for you by the glass or the bottle. So overall you get a nice meal at a good price, which is all you can ask for really, when you want a quick meal.
As I have mentioned above, we did go to the restaurant fairly early into their service, so the atmosphere was at its infancy for the night, so my rating might be a bit low. I did notice that on Sunday, they do have live Bouzouki music playing. So I would recommend going on a Sunday to have that traditional Greek experience. The service provided was also good, with the staff being very attentive to our needs. This may have been because we were really the only customers dining in at the time, so it was probably not a stretch to keep us well serviced.
So if you are a visitor to Adelaide and would like to make the trip to Port Adelaide and try El Greco, the best way to get there from the city centre is to catch the public train service to Outer Harbor. Get off about 20 minutes later at Port Adelaide and make your way down commercial road towards the red lighthouse, approximately a 7 minute walk.
Rating: 1-10 (1=very poor, 10 = excellent)
Decor = 6
Atmosphere = 6
Service = 8
Price = 9
Food = 8
Overall = 7
