My favorite entrée was good old moussaka ($18; $17/vegetarian), here a casserole of about double the usual portion, and again featuring winter eggplant with real eggplant flavor. It contained the usual layers of ground-meat and béchamel sauce, and an unusual aspect: home-style layers of potato and zucchini.
We took home about half of a chicken youvetsi ($19; $21/lamb): a casserole of beautiful orzo pasta and boneless chicken breast in a cinnamon-inflected tomato sauce. This came to the table in the clay pot it had been baked in, as does the lamb kleftiko ($20). The kleftiko was a lamb shank overcooked to the so-tender-it-melts-in-your-mouth level of tenderness, but I’d rather it were cooked a little less and imbued with more lamb flavor.
Lamb chops ($24) were three baby chops, medium-rare as ordered, but again without the full lamb flavor, perhaps because my idea of this is based on some caramelized lamb fat, and quite a bit of garlic and rosemary. All dinners come with a vegetable and two starches: roast potatoes and a heap of baked rice. (Since the youvetsi is a large casserole of rice-shaped pasta, you get only the potatoes.) The vegetable on all platters was overcooked green beans (and I agree with fellow critic Corby Kummer that overcooking green beans is necessary for full flavor) in a tomato-onion sauce.
Dionysos’s wine list — which ought to be, well, Dionysian — is all Greek and takes some (but not full) advantage of the improved and small-production wines now coming out of Greece. The wine list doesn’t note vintages. Our bottle of Boutari Naoussa Grand Reserve ($38) turned out to be the 1999, and it may predate some of the improvements, as I thought it was thin and showed some alcohol, although obviously it wasn’t too old. Given its four years in the barrel, I suspect better vintages of this wine have some of the qualities one used to get with over-aged Spanish reds. Decaf ($2) and Greek coffee ($4) were good. The latter had enough grounds for fortunetelling, although what that horse shape meant I will have to wait and see.
Because we are in a hotel, there is a children’s menu of $9 hamburgers and spaghetti, but desserts have no price compromises. And neither should you: go directly to the toothache-sweet baklava ($4) and kataifi ($6), resembling shredded wheat. The rice pudding ($4) was okay, and a fig-mousse cake ($6) was small and creamy but not distinctly flavored.
Service was generally good, with a couple of pauses typical of large rooms in which large private parties are ending. The atmosphere is hotel-neutral when it isn’t seemingly from an ethnic comedy. The wall art is postmodern and Greekish, but the real signifier is the music: vocals and clarinet solos you can’t mistake. But the river view — especially just after sunset — dominates all.
Dionysos | 777 Memorial Dr, Radisson Hotel, Cambridge | Mon-Thurs, 7-11 am and 5-11 pm; Fri, 7-11 am and 5 pm-1 am; Sat 5 pm-1 am; Sun 12:30 pm-1 am | AE, DC, DI, MC, VI | full bar | free parking in hotel lot | street-level access via elevator from side entrance | 617 .661.6800
Email the author
Robert Nadeau: RobtNadeau@aol.com
