Ola Kala

202 Morrison Street, Edinburgh

0131 629 2820

Lunch/Dinner £4-£15

Food rating 8/10

AN up-side to Greece's economic woes is that in the UK we get to hear from a stream of Syriza ministers, each as articulate as the other. Irrespective of your politics, it's hard not to be impressed by the sheer intellect and braininess of these men who behave like the living embodiment of Demosthenes, and make full use of his oratorical skills. And the looks! Darkly handsome. Intense. These are the professors that students fall in love with. Then there are those names with all their classical appeal - Alexis Tsipras, Yanis Varoufakis - although for sheer tongue-rolling nomenclature, my personal favourite is Euclid Tsakalotos. And isn't it refreshing to listen to conviction politicians who flout the clubby "adults in the room" rules cited by Christine Lagarde? What a tonic after all those rule-abiding "realists" whose every public utterance is filtered through a web of spin doctors and focus groups. A stiff ouzo never lifted the spirits this much.

Now, centuries before Varoufakis coined the term "fiscal waterboarding", the Greeks were experts in "austerity'" cooking. Unfairly, to my mind, Greek cooking is often dismissed as a lesser gastronomy, but I think the issue here is that Greek food is essentially home cooking. The recipes are relatively simple, and rely on certain kinds of heat (mainly slow), and the calibre of the ingredients. Fine dining in Greece, while it certainly exists, is strongly shaped by foreign influences, and very likely mostly appreciated by tax-dodging rich Greek elites. For everyone else, eating out in Greece is, in my experience, a more relaxed affair.

One model is the "come into the kitchen and look at what we have" eating place; another is the small establishment where it's all about the spit and the charcoal grill. Ola Kala in Edinburgh is one of that kind. It really does feel like being in Greece. A simple café with a vertical spit centre-stage and a partially open kitchen behind, it is warm with cooking smells, notably spit-roasted pork and charcoal-blistered pita bread, an aroma that few people other than vegans will find easy to resist. When I say smells, I'm not talking about endlessly reheated kebabs, or the stale whiff of over-refrigerated dips and salads, but the intoxicating scents of home cooking.

Ola Kala - Greek for "all's well" - is run by a Greek couple, and feels like being in Athens. Most of the customers are young Greeks, probably students, all with enviable amounts of raven hair, the men sporting pony tails, top knots and bristling beards, like a red and black tableau from Tales Of The Greek Heroes. I took the pita bread for homemade. In fact, it's imported from Greece, but appears to be made from unbleached flour. Briskly blistered over charcoal, drizzled with olive oil, and scattered with salt and dried oregano, it made the ideal vehicle for the dips. Charred specks of aubergine skin brought the necessary bonfire smokiness to melitzanosalata. Creamy htipiti (mashed feta with green chilli) was saltily soothing; violet-grey olive dip, emollient. Sun-dried tomato dip had an astonishing sweet intensity, the red pepper dip an earthy, throbbing heat. Tzatziki owed its heft to the stiffness of genuine Greek strained yoghurt, not that copycat "Greek-style" stuff.

There's char-grilled Saganaki and feta cheese for those who can resist the meats. I didn't love the sausages (too spongy and salty), but then after my researches into food manufacturing, I want written references for anything calling itself a sausage. Next time I visit I'm having the soutzoukaki, the traditional pork and veal mince.

What is not to be missed is a gyro, shavings of pork off the conical layered meat that turns on the spit under a larding layer of pork fat. It's like eating the best crusty bits from the surface of a juicy roast; the moist layer exposed as one is shaved off then crisps up in turn. For £4, your gyro comes wrapped in pita bread with a smear of tzatziki, a handful of home-made, hand-cut chips, and fine slivers of tomato and mild onion. It's the sandwich to end all sandwiches, from the country that was once the cradle of Western civilisation.