Category: fine dining

Concept: Kyma is a predominantly seafood Greek restaurant. The food we present here is reminiscent of the Greek islands. Kyma is two restaurants in one. We have an ouzeria, an ouzo bar, where you'll find small portions of meze. We have our own menu for it, and some people come just to dine in our bar. But if you're in the ouzeria because you like the atmosphere and you want to have the dining room menu, no problem. We don't say, you're sitting in the wrong area.

Menu hits: Probably 90 percent of the tables order octopus. They've heard about it. They brag about eating the octopus and want their friends to hear about it. I didn't expect that, but I'm not surprised because when I go to Greece, I order it everywhere.

We do sell a lot of whole fish. We offer customers the chance to walk up to our fish display and choose their own fish. We'll weigh it, bring it into the kitchen, scale it, clean it and put it on the oakwood grill. We baste it with olive oil and lemon juice, and when it's done, we take the head and tail off, take the fillets off the bone and put them back together.

When we first opened, we left the head and tail on. Our idea was to give everyone an opportunity to try the beautiful meat behind the cheeks and eyes, but no one was doing it. We gave it a shot, but the response of the crowd was that we're better off not doing that.

Other signature items are our giant prawns with ouzo, tomato sauce and imported Dodonis feta; and our htipiti (a spread of roasted red peppers and feta).

Menu misses: We started out with grilled sardines. While my family and many of the cooks and waiters who are Greek loved the sardines, a lot of people don't understand sardines and were ordering them and weren't satisfied. We wound up taking that off the menu. The funny thing is, we import baby smelts from Greece and these things are half the size of your pinky. We gently flour and fry them in olive oil and drizzle them with rosemary oil and people eat them like French fries.

Signature beverages: We have several types of ouzo and do wait-staff training with wines and ouzo every Saturday. The ouzos vary in levels of sugar and the vegetables used to flavor them. It's not always anise.

We serve our ouzo by the shot glass along with a pitcher of water and a tall glass of ice. That's how we drink it in Greece. You pour the ouzo over the ice and adjust with water. I think it has been a pleasant way for customers to learn that this is how you drink it.

About 85 percent of our wine list is Greek. We organize the list by body and flavor when we can, from light and dry white wines, to medium- and full-bodied white wines. The wait staff has tried every wine on the list.

What customers remember: When you come into Kyma, you feel like you've left Atlanta. That's what people talk about. You feel like you've been transported to Greece. People are also getting into the (shared) eating. It's an icebreaker. You may not know your business associates well, but you get to know them well.

Overcoming a challenge: When we opened, we put a little too much Greek on the menu, which created confusion for guests and may have been intimidating. We started off each line with the dish's Greek name, but no one knew it meant "octopus grilled over coals," so customers had to read too much. When you have as many options as we do, it's confusing enough. The Greek got in the way, so we took a lot of it off the menu, and now customers can easily read the menu.

The look: Before you walk into Kyma, you are walking on Thassos marble my father imported from Greece. In the entryway, you see Greek fish lanterns that you would see on the docks. As you enter, you're looking at a huge marble waterfall that trickles down behind our display of fish. So you know you're in a fish restaurant right off the bat.

We serve on all white in the dining room. In the ouzeria, we serve on colored plates handmade for us; it's a much more casual feel.

Making Greek food approachable: We train our staff hard. New employees train for a week before they hit the floor and are not allowed on the floor until they pass numerous tests. The ones who make it through training are going to do well for us. Any time there's a new ingredient we're bringing in, we taste them on it. That's how we're able to introduce Greek flavors in a friendly way.

There's no sense opening a Greek restaurant, then Americanizing it to the point where you've taken the soul out of the cooking. But let's put it this way: We're not putting tripe soup or braised pig's head on the menu, but things that people are already eating when they go to Greece. Greek flavors aren't intimidating. It's basically just getting people past the ordering.

View the Kyma menu