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The Gyro looks anything but boring


Mr. Silly
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19 hours ago, Mr. Silly said:

Lamb-Gyro-Recipe-4-of-6.jpg

Yum!

Back around 1980, my friend Phyllis and I were in Washington, D.C. - the high-tech communications company she worked for had rented an entire floor of a hotel near the Capital and she phoned me and invited to come down the night before and we had lots of fun hopping bars, having a V.P. of Sprint pay for our $60/plate Chinese food in a fancy restaurant, etc.

We got up the next morning, got overpriced crap for breakfast at the hotel, then headed out for a tour of the Capitol Building.  After that, Phyllis turned her nose up when I suggested getting lunch at a tiny Greek place with outdoor seating across from the Capitol.  She had hit the big-time and felt entitled to ONLY expensive cuisine.

But I talked her into gyros, chips, and soft drinks and she said, "Wow!  This is the best food I've had in D.C.!

 

Fast forward to 1996.  Phyllis and I are doing an "Aegean Odyssey Cruise" that began with 3 days in Athens and Southern Greece.  I had learned from a tour book to check out the "Plaka" area of Athens as the one with authentic and reasonably priced souvenirs.  The problem was, few people there spoke anything besides Greek.

In the Plaka community, we found a large outside-seating restaurant and decided to have lunch there because it was across from a church and looked safe.  We couldn't read the Greek-letter menu, the waiter didn't speak English well and we could only say, "Gyro" (pronounced "YEE-rrow", rolling the r) because we didn't know how to order anything else.

Just as the waiter began to walk away, Phyllis's eyes widened as she looked behind me at a table of Germans who were being served a great looking dish.  Phyllis called the waiter back and indicated we would have whatever the Germans were having.  It looked like this, but with a flat pita on the bottom and, after you removed the small chunks of grilled lamb from the skewers and mixed them into the feta cheese, onions, etc., it ate more like an open-faced gyro but with chunks of grilled meat instead of shaved meat.

GREECE: Souvlaki vs. Gyros, so What’s the Difference?

Some of the Germans spoke English and we learned we were getting "Open Faced Souvlaki."  It was excellent and beer went well with it.  The "Shawarma" I ate in Jesus's birthplace, Bethlehem, Palestinian Autonomous Zone, in 1999, after watching as the meat was shaved off of the spindle of lamb and then mixed with onion, etc., is supposedly from where the Greeks borrowed the idea of the Gyro and Souvlaki.  But the Greeks have that Tzatziki Sauce and Feta Cheese and that sets their version apart!

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