Food Preview: 78th Annual St. Elias Mediterranean Festival This Weekend

Seventy-eight years in a town like Austin is an eternity. For the members of St. Elias Orthodox Church, those seventy-eight years have been an opportunity to share the very best of their culture: namely, food. This Friday and Saturday from 6pm to midnight, the seventy-eighth annual St. Elias Mediterranean Festival will be occurring downtown on 11th Street between Red River and Trinity. Come for the souvlaki, but stay for the hand-rolled cigars.

Yes, we all love hummus. But at the St. Elias Festival there will be old classics from the Mediterranean canon that they can’t even pronounce in California. Start with tyropita, a Greek puff pastry of filo dough sheets stuffed with goat cheese. Add spinach, and you’ve got spanakopita. To fully enjoy the sour goodness that is Greek food, order a serving of feta cheese (goat) and Kalamata olives (Greece’s one true crop). Dolmas round out the Greek appetizers (called mezedes), consisting of a rice and meat combination wrapped in grape leaves and cooked in lemon juice.

Sampler plates come in three nationalities: Eritrean, Romanian, and Middle Eastern (if you don’t know where Eritrea is, it’s right next to Djibouti). We definitely recommend the sandwiches, consisting of beef or chick souvlaki - meat cubes seasoned with oregano, lemon juice, and salt shish-kabobed on the grill; falafel - deep fried balls of garbanzo beans, garlic, and onions stuffed inside a pita with tomatoes and tahini; and gyro (pronounced yee-ro) - thin slices of beef wrapped in a pita with lettuce, tomato, and, of course, tzatziki sauce, one of the best things to come out of Greece since democracy.