Ten tables in Thessaloniki, and a menu called The Cook’s Prayer

Deka Trapezia means ten tables, and ten is what the room has at Stratigou Kallari 4, Thessaloniki, by the house’s own design. The house grants that ten sounds like few, and says the small number is the reason it can give each plate the care it does. It calls itself a modern mezedopoleio: a room built around mezedes, the small plates a Greek table is assembled from and shares, served here with no duty to one region or to the traditional form of them.

The cooking carries the signature of Manolis Papoutsakis, chef and co-owner, who owns the house with Paschalina Kamtsiki. They opened shortly before Greece’s first lockdown, in early 2020. The plates are small, worked out in the kitchen before they reach the table, and the list beside them is narrowed on purpose: spirits and wine from indigenous Greek varieties only.

It sits outside the usual categories, taverna and restaurant included, and the house’s stated ambition is that ten tables should want for nothing beside a good restaurant. The tables are the open space over which that cooking unfolds, and the house puts it to Thessaloniki, a city fond of good mezedes, spirits and wine, as a new gastronomic proposition.

The card

The card runs to 24 plates, ordered freely, and a full meal from it costs about 30 euros. Day dishes are added to it, and the season and what it brings in decide what changes. Among the mezedes it carries are boiled zigouri, yearling mutton, with trahana cream, sweet paprika and sheep’s yoghurt; beetroot, carrot and sweet potato with onion, celeriac, mandarin and apple vinegar; red mullet with artichoke cream and pickled okra; marinated anchovy with pickled stamnagathi, hot pepper, artichoke and radish; salt cod fried with wild greens and quail eggs; and lamb meatballs with a chickpea cream of cumin and curry. The portions are built for the middle of the table.

What Papoutsakis said he would do before the room opened was serve mezedes, but not in their traditional form. The logic of sharing stayed and the shapes changed, each plate resting on something traditional and arriving in a newer form of it. His travels abroad show up on the card too, in dishes he has taken into Greek terms in his own way: an octopus sausage served as a hot dog in buttered brioche, or deep fried quail with a cream of smoked dried plum.

Beside the card the house keeps a degustation, named The Cook’s Prayer on its own card. It runs in five served groups and is priced at 65 euros, or 93 euros with the wine pairing. Papoutsakis chose the name because he would like to serve only that, or mostly that.

The card of July 2021 ran to stuffed vegetables with smoked sardine, smoked mackerel with cracked wheat and pickled askordoulakoi, the wild bulbs eaten widely in Crete, and veal liver with pickled kokkari onion, thyme, red fruit and a sauce of nama and coffee. Grilled green beans arrived with peach, walnut, tyromalama, the soft Cretan cheese, prawns and ladolemono.

Where the tasting menu came from

The form reached Thessaloniki by way of Stockholm. Papoutsakis served an apprenticeship at Frantzen there, and he tried the idea first at Charoupi, as six plates for 45 euros, before a ten-table mezedopoleio came to carry a full tasting menu.

Charoupi and Crete

Charoupi was his first restaurant, and he was talking about Deka Trapezia there long before it opened. His family comes from Kissamos, at the western end of Chania in Crete, and that kitchen is a plain influence on what he cooks. In July 2021 the card carried a green dako with mizithra cream, Aegina pistachios and plenty of basil; lamb tsigariasto with a soft trahana cream and sheep’s yoghurt; and fried potatoes with staka, bottarga, fig and lemon.

The room

The dining room is quiet, with the kitchen open to it, and it is held to a short palette: beige, ivory, mosaic and the wood of the American chairs. The kitchen works every day from 12.30pm to midnight. Reservations are taken on 2310 25 10 10 or through the house’s own booking page.

Who is this for

The room suits anyone who eats by sharing and likes to choose as the meal goes: small groups, plates set in the middle of the table, tsipouro, ouzo or raki going round with them. The register is a neighbourhood evening. Stratigou Kallari is a pedestrian street with the water visible between the seafront blocks, and in July 2021 the tables had come out onto it.