Long Island Greek restaurants Noema in Huntington and Plori in Carle Place are changing the dining scene

Extravagant. Innovative. Pricey.

Greek?

Long Island’s Greek dining scene has traditionally featured simple fare, modest prices and casual digs — more souvlaki than sous vide. But with their culinary chops and dazzling décor, two new restaurants, Noema in Huntington and Plori in Carle Place, are betting that customers are ready for more.

Noema’s chef, Nicholas Poulmentis, has a thing for truffles that can’t stop, won’t stop. His signature black-truffle tarama offers a stark contrast between the inky, truffle-infused whipped herring roe and a snow-white, melt-in-your-mouth powder that also, somehow, tastes of truffles. At Plori, Panayotis Dalitsouris’s grilled octopus tentacles recline on a suave bed of pureed, smoked fava beans with a reduction of aged balsamic vinegar.

Both restaurants represent a new wave of a relatively recent phenomenon. Most observers date the beginning of Greek fine dining in the U.S. to 1987 when Periyali opened in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. Ten years later, Estiatorio Milos, a soaring temple to seafood, debuted in midtown, establishing the playbook — grand surroundings, stratospheric prices, and a display of fresh fish reposing on ice —  that eventually crossed the East River to Long Island.

Or, more specifically, to Roslyn. Both Limani (2008) and Kyma (2013) owe their opening menus and management to Milos. During the last decade, eateries such as Neraki in Huntington (2011), Platia in Syosset (2016), Elaia Estiatorio in Bridgehampton (2017) and the Limani offshoots, Taverna (2018), Mezze and Grille (both 2021), all sought to deliver a similar experience at a lower price.

NOEMA, HUNTINGTON

Noema’s owner, Lisa DiPinto, did not want to retrace the Milos template. “Chef Nick and I wanted to create something unlike what other Greek restaurants have done,” she said. “We wanted to reinvent Greek food.”

Poulmentis’ opening salvo is a subtle one: He replaces the ubiquitous round zucchini chips with fried zucchini batons that are stacked like Lincoln logs and sit on a foundation not of garlicky tzatziki but of his own version of mint-flecked Greek yogurt that utilizes both buttermilk and almond milk. (That same yogurt, mintless, is deployed for a dessert studded with halved berries and red-veined sorrel leaves.)

Before moving to the U.S. in 2011, Poulmentis spent time cooking in France, Italy and Switzerland, but his palate’s home is on the island of Kythera, where he grew up and ran a restaurant for many years, cooking almost exclusively with the fish, meat and produce that grew around him. While helming kitchens at Manhattan’s Kellari Taverna and, briefly, Long Island's Limani Group, he became a frequent competitor on the Food Network. As he became more established in the culinary firmament, however, he felt increasingly limited by prevailing notions of Greek food.

Poulmentis’s loukoumades look, at first glance, like their namesake honeyed doughnut holes. But each golden ball conceals a curled-up shrimp, the “honey,” a sweet-spicy sambal aioli. To up the crunch factor, they are served on little latkes of fried seaweed. Seaweed, it turns out, is eaten on the Greek islands and the chef uses imported rock samphire (kritama) to garnish his dakos salad. “Dakos” refers to the dried barley rusk that traditionally anchors this salad; at Noema, it is switched out for a crumbly, savory biscuit made from carob flour.

DiPinto grew up helping out in her Greek grandparents’ Cedarhurst coffee shop and went on to a career in upscale hospitality working, most recently, at Kyma. Her team transformed the tri-level space that used to be 7 Gerard (and, before that, Jema and Porto Vivo) with organic materials — wood, wicker, wildflowers — and fanciful allusions to Greece, from the life-size plaster statues of sheep to surreal paintings of gorgons turning into flowers.

PLORI, GARDEN CITY

At Plori, partner Buffy Dimas also created a unique décor, traveling to Greece to source all the materials and artwork. “Plori” refers to the prow of a ship, the first thing waiting villagers would see of the fishing boat, laden with catch, making its way to shore in the morning mist. Plori’s dining room and bar are replete with nautical touches such as a light fixture fashioned from vintage brass chronometers and a room divider made with maritime ropes and pulleys.

Buffy and her husband, Spiro, also own the Old Westbury Diner and the Williston Townhouse Diner in Williston Park. They had long nurtured a dream of opening a restaurant where they could focus on and elevate Greek food. Spiro pointed to the Athens Olympics in 2004 as a watershed event. “The cachet of Greece increased,” he said. “More people were traveling there, coming home and wanting to have that experience here.” Around 2015, he recalled, the couple started thinking seriously about their restaurant but “we needed the right location, the manager, the right chef.”

The location presented itself in the form of Cafe Formaggio, which closed in 2020. Situated on Old Country Road across from Whole Foods and the Gallery at Westbury Plaza (Shake Shack, Trader Joe’s, The Container Store, Nordstrom Rack, Saks Off Fifth and more) and down the road from Roosevelt Field, “it is in the center of everything,” he said, while also acknowledging that most of Long Island's other upscale Greek spots are far north of the Long Island Expressway.

Next came general manager Dino Philippou, who operated Astoria’s well-known Greek restaurant-nightclub Cavo for almost two decades. The Dimases knew enough about fine dining to know that they couldn’t run Plori like a diner. “We needed someone like Dino to oversee the dining room, to put together a wine list, to train the waitstaff.”

Finally, they found their chef in Panayotis Dalitsouris. Like his counterpart at Noema, he grew up close to the land and carries those flavors with him in what he calls “my vault.” At the family’s farm near Sparta in the Peloponnese, his childhood was spent tending animals, kneading bread, stoking the oven in the predawn hours. He would help in the lamb slaughter and, afterward, his mother would fry up the sweetbreads (thymus gland) for a treat. At Plori, veal sweetbreads are pan-roasted with shallots, served with a reduction of Mavrodaphne (a Peloponnesian red) and Manouri cheese. His mother’s briam (a casserole of roast vegetables) supports a pileup of three char-kissed lamb chops drizzled with chimichurri made with extra-virgin olive oil from around Sparta.

The menu’s seafood brings up more memories. Dalitsouris’s village, Paleopanagia, was quite a ways inland from the Ionian Sea. Every Saturday night, he recalled, a fishmonger would show up with a truckload of fish on ice. “He would use a megaphone to let everyone know what he had, he’d remember what your family liked. Everything would get wrapped up in newspaper and then on Sunday we would have fish.”

Plori does brisk business with grilled whole fish (every day there is red snapper, black sea bass, tsipoura and lavraki) but also grilled calamari with braised leeks, feta and tomato concassé; and pan-seared sea scallops with a saffron risotto and wild mushrooms and grilled salmon with artichokes and leek risotto.

And Dalitsouris transforms the humble Aegean fish soup, kakavia, into a North Atlantic shellfish extravaganza, loading it up with mussels, clams, calamari, scallops and shrimp and crowning it with a whole lobster.

“It’s the same flavors my mother cooked with but," he conceded, "it is elevated with today’s techniques and a little showmanship.”