The Favourite Greek

The dips are where The Favourite Greek shows its hand. Hot Peppers & Feta comes out as roasted peppers whipped into creamy feta, sharp enough to reset the palate between bites, and the tzatziki is a family recipe — Greek yogurt cut with cucumber and garlic — that lands beside almost everything the kitchen sends out. This is a Greek restaurant on George Street North in downtown Peterborough, run by the Vassiliadis family, and the house dips are the clearest tell that the food is built on recipes carried in a family rather than pulled off a supplier's shelf. Order two of them with warm pita and the meal has already found its centre.

The plates run on souvlaki. Chicken is the clearest first order — grilled marinated skewers with Greek salad, tzatziki, and a choice of rice, potatoes, or fries — and the same complete-plate format carries pork, beef, and lamb. Greek Fries are the side regulars reach for, the one upgrade that makes a casual order taste specifically like this kitchen rather than a generic counter. The heavier end of the menu holds three marinated lamb chops grilled to order, lightly battered calamari with lemon, and tigania, a stir-fry of onions, peppers, mushroom, and soutzoukaki served as a dinner for two. Saganaki still does its trick tableside, kefalograviera flambéed with brandy and carried out with pita. Spanakopita, dolmades, and a village salad heavy with feta fill out the Greek side of the card, and baklava closes the night.

Read the menu top to bottom and a logic emerges: nothing is sold as a deal, and nothing needs to be. The value is in the architecture. A souvlaki dinner already arrives complete, the family-format dinners feed four off a single order, and the platters and dips are built to be pushed into the middle of the table. It is a mid-range kitchen with portion sense — the kind of place where a group settles the bill without anyone having had to work out a strategy first. Even the vegetarian platter, three dips with toasted pita, spanakopita, and Greek salad, reads as a real dinner rather than a meatless afterthought.

That same plate logic is what lets the food travel. The Vassiliadis kitchen runs its own online ordering rather than handing the menu to a third party, and the pita wraps, souvlaki dinners, and family meals arrive at the door as the same restaurant they are at the table. Wraps come in chicken, pork, beef, lamb-and-beef gyro, and a vegetarian build of tomato, onion, feta, and tzatziki, which makes the takeout list as deep as the dine-in one. Catering extends the same idea outward, for the nights the order is bigger than a single table.

The family behind it gives the food its weight. George Vassiliadis owns and operates The Favourite Greek and cooks in it, and local reporting traces his line back through Peterborough's Greek-restaurant history — to Bob Vassiliadis, to roots on the island of Chios, to the city's old Shish-Kabob Hut, by way of culinary training at George Brown College. The current restaurant opened in 2010, a continuation rather than a fresh start. That lineage is why the tzatziki tastes like a recipe somebody has been making for decades, and why the dining room carries a memory the menu never has to spell out.

Strip away the backstory and the strongest order is still the simplest one: souvlaki, Greek salad, tzatziki, and one side — usually the Greek Fries — that makes the plate feel finished. Add a dip or two when the table is bigger, end on baklava, and the evening holds together without much planning. That ease is the through-line on George Street, where a downtown Greek kitchen has spent more than fifteen years making the same plates the way the family makes them at home.