DO GREEK people own this place, I ask the cheery serving person by way of idle chit-chat as I look around at the slick neon decor and wait for Joe to rock up. No, comes the reply. So, is it a chain? No again, is the answer. But, I am told, the owners do have other restaurants. Just not of the same type.
Ah. During all this, guys in the kitchen behind are flipping round puffy pittas, hewing hunks from rotisseries while delivery riders nip in then fire back out onto their electric bicycles before fizzing off into the night.
Right now, Joe walks in with a perfect cartoon double-take at the lack of tables and chairs.
“And I was worried I wasn’t properly dressed for a kebab shop,” he whispers. “Shoap”, actually is the word he uses, being from Ayrshire. But he’s right, I concede, as we settle at a bench at the window with around £30 worth of brown packages before us waiting to be unwrapped.
Mixed gyro, Yeros sauce, Greek sausage souvlaki, garlic sauce, vegan Yeros box (I forget which sauce) , lamb souvlaki and falafel gyro are sprawled across the counter.
Directly across the road, the lights are out on the once great Lorne Hotel while virtually through the wall, Ox and Finch is still so en vogue, there are people sitting at open tables on the, frankly, chilly and damp-looking pavement. It’s a Tuesday night too. And we’re pretty much slap bang inside Glasgow’s still-hottest food area; the famous Finnieston strip.
The gyro then, and you want to sit down for this, is apparently just the Greek name for the Turkish doner. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
But it has only been in widespread use since the 1970s and that was, some say anyway, adopted largely for political reasons – well, that’s if you believe Mr Google.
Glasgow certainly has pretty much always been kebab city, largely of the rotating elephant’s leg on-the-way-home-from-the-pub variety. It became more artisan recently with the award-winning Shawarma King, moved on again into brilliant Syrian kebabs (that’s you, Lazord in Howard Street), and now suddenly it seems there’s an explosion of Greek or gyro places kinda everywhere.
Tonight Matthew, I could apparently have gone to MacTassos, Yiamas (definitely proper Greek), Gyros, Halloumi, Babs – and there’s a new van beside the Riverboat Casino called Feta. Oh, and Six By Nico just up the road here is having a Greek menu this very month.
Frankly? I dropped a mental pin in a muddled mind map and ended up here, where the big, bouncy and very round pitta flop back in exhaustion at the sheer strain of keeping meat, yoghurt, onion, tomatoes and of course a (very) heavy serving of chips (dusted with paprika) in check.
Flavour? Hang on. First we crunch falafel – oops too much crunching because they are dry – and inveigle slippery, oily and (for me) too mushy tasting-right-outta-tin dolmades whilst picking at various pieces of meat. Those shavings from the rotisseries turn out to be clean, light but not that flavoursome.
Where’s the charring that prompts that Maillard reaction that can make even shoe leather taste good? Absent.
The lamb souvlaki is charred but dry too. Hmm.
At least the Greek sausage souvlaki are spiced, meaty, savoury sensations with that crispy, crackle when the properly seared outer is bitten into and the joyful juices released.
The thing about a gyro though is this: shouldn’t it be an all-in-one tightly-wrapped layer after layer sensation? Because, we’re not really getting that here.
What we are getting is a kind of sanitised, cleanly-cooked, lots-of-chips, not-enough-meat-to-make-an-impact version.
Is this yet another of the theme restaurants sweeping the city, like theme pubs of back in the day, where it’s never mind the flavour, look how modernly it’s repackaged and – by the way – check the Instagram-hits? Meh.
YEROS
910 Sauchiehall Street
Glasgow
G3 7TF
Opening: seven days from 11.30am
Contact: on all the apps
Menu: It’s another of the currently and suddenly in vogue Greek Gyro restaurants sweeping Glasgow, Gyros, falafel, souvlaki, dolmades. 3
Service: Counter service was great, brisk, fast and friendly enough to make an impression. 5
Atmosphere: Frankly? It’s a very modern neon-lit, cleanly designed take on a kebab shop - with four seats. Fine. 3
Price: Possibly their real secret sauce, £5.50 for a sizeable gyro that comes, as it should, stuffed with chips as well. In the West End too. 4
Food: Felt like a sanitised, crisply executed, but kinda soulless version of the classic Greek Gyro, too many chips in the wrap, meats not really distinctive, sausage great but otherwise utterly inoffensive. 5
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