An important omission on the menu at Taverna Kos in Astoria, Queens, is the enormous plate of feta you may see passing your table en route to a smarter party of people. Heaps of the imported cheese, which the restaurant buys in 28-pound containers, come flecked with dried oregano and slicked with olive oil, and act as a soft, creamy condiment for fried or broiled seafood, or dainty lamb chops.
The off-menu cheese course, which anyone can ask for, will remind you that feta can be just as slouchy as any washed-rind French cheese, as long as you buy the right stuff and put it on something hot. You could also just order a plate of feta fries, in which the crumbles melt into the soft, fresh-cut potatoes like a tangy, higher-quality Cheez Whiz.
Taverna Kos has been open to members of the Pancoan Society, a private club with which it shares a building, for 11 years; in 2016 the restaurant opened its doors to the public, and last summer began serving on weekends. There’s a lightly celebratory air about the place: String lights abound, tangled into the trees outside and lining the ceiling of the enclosed patio, where televisions play a constant stream of poppy Greek music videos.
The Greek salad is mandatory if only for its hyper-creamy feta and slippery, rich kalamata olives.CreditJenny Huang for The New York Times
Service here echoes the warm pragmatism of a Greek diner: The wait staff, clad in royal-blue polo shirts, often operates like a crew of busy uncles, attentive to your needs and eager to see you happy but unlikely to babysit anyone more than necessary. They will happily direct new diners to the laminated menu’s best seafood options, such as fried calamari that look like knuckles thanks to the pink-purple flesh that shines through their flaky batter, or an entire fish showered in oregano and broiled until its edges blister.
The owner, Kostas Karargiorgis, is from the Greek island Nisyros; he named the restaurant after the island where his wife, Maria Karargiorgis, grew up. (She also works at the restaurant, cooking the daily specials; their son, Mike, is the assistant manager.)
The restaurant favors and excels at seafood, but Mr. Karargiorgis, 66, also serves what he calls Greek-American food, like hamburgers. “I’m American,” he said, “I’ve been here 50 years!”
A whole branzino comes swimming in a light pool of olive oil and lemon, its belly so lush and creamy that a spritz of lemon juice makes it taste custardlike, hinting at desserts to come. This light touch with seasoning shows up throughout the restaurant’s entrees: Mr. Karargiorgis plates most of his proteins with lemon, olive oil and oregano, but insists that the herb is optional.
The octopus, that star of the Greek seafood canon, is treated with similar restraint, yielding outsize results. It’s boiled, then broiled, and not even touched with a shake of salt; instead of getting the standard hard sear, its skin becomes nearly sticky with caramelization, barely dotted with crusty bits and creamy inside.
And then there’s the tripe soup, a specialty that gets its own corner of the menu. Its broth — made with a chunk of calf’s leg — turns almost extraterrestrially milky, thick with cartilage and gelatin. Boiled tripe bobs through it, around the leg bone, which serves as a centerpiece. The soup can be an acquired taste for first-timers, but feels like fortification.
“In Greece they go to the nightclubs, and then at 5 o’clock in the morning they eat this,” Mr. Karargiorgis said. “It’s like medicine.”
A whole meal can be fashioned from the restaurant’s starters. Fragrant Greek sausage, or loukaniko, is sliced and broiled, breaching like a whale from its casing. A trio of dips — spicy feta, tzatziki and skordalia, whipped potatoes with loads of garlic — act as both appetizer and condiment. A wide platter of Greek salad, worth it alone for the fat and slippery kalamata olives that bedeck it, can offset a similar-size serving of saganaki, a bubbly swath of fried cheese fit for a crowd. And every meal ends with complimentary dessert, the best of which is galaktoboureko, a thick custard baked under phyllo whose wrinkly top glistens with syrup.
Mr. Karargiorgis occasionally holds court at one of the outside tables, if they’re free. On a recent Sunday afternoon, he doled out a few plates of off-menu sausage cut into fat slices further plumped in a pan, lazing about in a slick tomato sauce surrounded by soft, barely-there onions. It was homey and rich, and we sopped up the sauce with the extra-large basket of French bread that pops up on every table.
“It’s the sweet Italian sausage from Costco,” he later told us. “I make it for myself all the time.”
