Dining Out 006: Evi's

Lunch in East Dulwich.

You go to different restaurants when you want different outcomes. You go to Quality Wines when you want to smoulder behind a plate of crab tagliatelle, you go to Rita’s when you want to eat Caesar salad and drink a martini in the afternoon like millennial Lucille Bluth, and you go to Yemanes when it is lunchtime in Peckham and you are in the market for deep fried halloumi that tastes like you are communing with the divine. Some places feel best in the daytime, and some are totally made for evenings, as a candle flickers on the table and you bite the inside of your lip, wondering what might happen next.

There are also other (less common) restaurants that do both pretty well – places that are airy and laid-back during the afternoon, and suddenly dark and conspiratorial-feeling at night. Obviously, tons of places in London are open all day, but at most of them, there’s usually the sense that either lunch or dinner is the better move. It is the rare establishment, then, that is just as good at getting you pissed as it is at soothing your hangover. 

Evi’s in Dulwich is one of those restaurants. If I were the type of person to fuck around with cricket metaphors, I would call it a real Ian Botham-type spot, because it’s a proper all-rounder (if you click off this page after reading that I won’t blame you). The dining room is narrow at the front, and it opens up wide, with a little garden, in the back. Elegant in the evenings, and chilled-out with plenty of room for kids at lunchtime, Evi’s does a very good line in classic, seriously well-executed Greek dishes.

The menu is centred on grilled meat and veg, stays the same across services, and straddles both day and night weirdly effortlessly. Greek food is big in London Restaurant World at the moment – brand new, much-hyped sister restaurants Oma and Agora in Borough have made sure of that – but Evi’s has been rocking for almost a year now, keeping it cute and simple. In that time, I’d say on balance, it has probably become one of my favourite places to eat. 

I’ve been to Evi’s during the daytime, I’ve been there at night, I’ve been there alone, and with mates. It’s good all ways, capable of a genuine switch-up between day and night. This is massively enabled by the cooking: the food is simple enough for families, but the ingredients are seasonal and well-sourced, so the dishes feel refined (pork chops are from Tamworth pigs, for example, and sheep’s cheese is bought in from St. James’ dairy in the Lake District). Most menu items are intended for sharing, so combined with the size of the little tables for two – up against the wall near the kitchen, just short enough for your knees to knock against whoever is sitting opposite – it’s a pretty good set-up for dinner with someone you fancy.

I can tell you that with decent authority, actually, because the first time I went to Evi’s was on a date. It was a second date with someone who came to be important to me for a while. We ordered a little food – a Patzarosalata, with beetroot, pumpkin and orange; halloumi with hot honey; courgette and feta fritters – and a lot of drinks (dessert, if you want, comes with a shot of raki, as Greek hospitality dictates). At first there was some awkwardness – warming up to each other again was a bit stilted; lots of “what have you been up to?” and all that type of shit craic that nobody actually enjoys – but somewhere along the line, someone mentioned Richard Thompson and that was that. 

I wrote for Vogue once about why I think restaurant dates are, emphatically, the way to go, and this was an especially great example of why: it was fun to choose what to eat together, and to share dessert, both of us doing that thing where you keep halving the last bite until it’s tiny, so you can offer it to the other person, saying “that’s yours”. I remember exactly what it was like to look at him across the table with a glass of wine in my hand – a Roditis with an unusual botanic taste that I liked – while Mazzy Star played, for fuck’s sake, and I thought “oh Christ here we go”.

I felt listened to and as the tealight on the table glowed on my face, I felt admired, too – all the things you feel on a good date in the right place. I don’t think any of that would have flooded me nearly as keenly had Evi’s itself not been so good at what it does: if the tables weren’t so cosy and the lights not so artfully low and the food less effortlessly tasty. The conditions were ripe for enjoying myself, and more importantly, for enjoying someone else. I don’t even talk to the person I ate and drank with that night any more, but I remember it with so much fondness. Everything just felt easy. 

Since that night, I’ve been to Evi’s on a few occasions, always in different contexts, and I’ve invariably been charmed. One particularly memorable Saturday a little while back, I went in by myself, desperately hungover, and healed myself from the inside out with a lunch of bread and tzatziki and chicken thighs, their skin so blistered on the grill that it crunched and then melted in my mouth in a way I will recall on my deathbed. The place was different to the way it had been in the evening, but there was still an essential geniality. I loved seeing it all happening around me as I tucked in – there were couples who’d come in on a whim, families with babies merrily mushing up oregano-seasoned chips in their pudgy little hands, friends gossing over taramasalata, and a local mum popping in to book a table for a night that week*. 

Things were similarly good-natured last Sunday, when I took my best pal Emma along for Sunday lunch*. We’d been on a long walk to Dulwich Park – during which, I am very pleased to announce, we won joint gold in the World Yapping Championships! Thank you to everyone who supported us! – that set us up perfectly for strapping on the nose-bag for a big old feed.

To ease into proceedings, we went for tzatziki and oily, herby flatbread (if you go to Evi’s and don’t get the tzatziki – so light as to be almost whipped, the garlic never overpowering – I will come to your house and citizen’s arrest you I’m afraid), and an asparagus and smoked feta dish from the specials board.

Someone said to me once that you can get the measure of a place based on what they do with their bread and potatoes – an absolute truism; I can’t think of any European restaurant I’ve ever eaten at where that doesn’t apply – but I also think you can get a sense of the level of care that any grill restaurant is taking based on how they treat vegetables***. Grilled meat is always going to absolutely rock, but the fact that this is such a given – it’s like saying “Hey, you know what’s great? Sex and breathing” – means that vegetables are so often an afterthought.

While I will say that the Greek salad could use a little more feta – because it could use more salt – the chefs at Evi’s are taking asparagus to an elite level: it was probably the best dish I ate all day. Up against the char from the grill, the sweetness of the greens was almost neon bright, and an accompaniment of feta, itself also strongly cut through with smoke, amped up that contrast even more. 

Our veggie main, Lahanika, or vegetable skewers, on which delicate frills of aubergine, mushroom, red onion and courgette were lubed up with olive oil, and also given a blast on the grill (it’s a small touch, but the very thin slices really made a difference, so it all felt especially tender). Elsewhere, we plumped for chicken (I say “we” but it was just for me because Emma doesn’t eat meat and I had been thinking about it for weeks), and a whole mackerel.

Obviously, this stuff was the real main event, the headliner, the Nirvana to the vegetables’ Teenage Fanclub at Reading 1992. I love Greek food in general because it tends to follow a maxim that applies to all my favourite things to eat – “cook it with a light touch, season it a little, bang a load of olive oil on it, then take a shot when you’re done” – and both the chicken and the fish were fine examples of how well that pretty much always goes.

The chicken is served on top of flatbread so that you don’t lose the taste of any of that precious fat, and the mackerel comes headless but whole, the skin blackened on grill, the inside pale and flaky. Emma and I both dug in with the sort of fugue state intensity that I find only something as inviting as a crisp-skinned fish, set down to share, can elicit, so much so that our forks kept clinking together as our hands danced around, looking for the juicy bits.

In a wildly unnatural move for me, we skipped dessert (never fear: I located and ate half an Easter egg about an hour after I got home), then settled up, and merrily yapped all the way back to the train station. The meal was great because Evi’s is always great – I knew it would be great, and that’s why I suggested we go.

Often, eating out in London can be a minefield – there’s a carousel of “spots you HAVE to try” that spins so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up, and even then, they might not live up to the hype (let’s face it: they’re usually mid!) – so it figures that most people have places they’ll always go back to, where they know they’ll have a great time, and be happy to pay for the food. For me, regardless of what I’m doing – dating, staring into the Saturday hangover void, talking shit with my pals – Evi’s has been one of those solid, wonderful places.

I paid for this visit. 

* I love the act of eating Sunday lunch – of luxuriating in a meal, of having a wine at 1PM and falling asleep at 5 – but as (say it with me) an Italian girl, I am very rarely convinced by Sunday roasts, which are too often overpriced, boring, and crap, because they are lacking in any actual flavour or harmony. Growing up, I knew Sunday lunch as bowls of pasta with ice cream afterwards, and that’s still what I like best now. Near where I live, you can get a pretty good version of that at Artusi, where three courses are £29 on a Sunday, with two options per course. There’s always an interesting veggie starter, a really big portion of hearty pasta, and a fun dessert, like a cake or pastry. The dishes change weekly, and the presence of those carbs means it’s just as comforting as a roast in its own way, only a lot more interesting. For what it’s worth, though – the best roast I’ve had in a long minute was lamb belly at the Earl of Derby, near Skehan’s in New Cross. I never see on any Best Roasts “lists” but it is more affordable and more delicious than most pub roasts I have eaten in the city. OK! Cheers! 

** I hate the phrase “neighbourhood restaurant” when it’s applied incongruously, but I do think Evi’s earns the label. In among the absolute nonsense that London Restaurant Reservations have become since Covid, I thought someone coming in and chatting to staff they obviously knew was strangely lovely. What I’m saying is: death “reserve your meal a week in advance” culture.

*** Brat is divisive but they are, undeniably, the absolute best at this, to the extent that the smoked piquillo pepper dish they do shits all over the seafood.

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Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. It’s free to read every Thursday, but if you’d like to support what we do, you can do so here. To receive Dining Out directly to your inbox, subscribe via the button below:

See you next week!