Perhaps all cooks, professional or amateur, require a pinch of narcissism to cook with abandon. Certainly, in my late mother’s Greek kitchen, the ego reigned supreme. It mingled with the smells of finely chopped parsley sizzling with red onions before being fused with rice to stuff into roasted tomatoes. The whiff of perfectionism melded with cassia sticks and origanum to nudge the chicken into shape for hilopetes, a rustic Peloponnesian dish made with egg noodles and sprinkled with myzithra, a dried, hard goat’s cheese. Pigs’ trotters and fennel barely covered the redolence of domestic hubris. 

Phyllo pastry was rolled out on a wooden table using a broomstick handle and a steely determination. Bread dough was pounded into shape by strong fists and force of will.

The family was taught to be quietly vigilant when visiting another such mistress’s table. A rare visit to a Greek restaurant required careful mental note-taking. There was always a potentially fraught debriefing after – hardly disguised by the curdled nonchalance. “Was the lamb dry?” Or, “Could you taste that spanakopita was a bit burned?” 

Though my late mother has been gone in physical form for years and can no longer sniff out culinary competition, I still enter Greek eateries with my heart in my mouth. Even now, while iffy about the existence of an afterlife, I dread the inevitable report-back which arrives unbidden into my unconscious. What a relief when I taste soggy vine leaves in the dolmades or a cowardly runniness in the moussaka’s béchamel sauce, showing the cook did not have the stomach to wait another few minutes to thicken the sauce. “Yes, yours was better,” I can concede to her memory.

But in the midst of the Atlantic Seaboard, practically in my mother’s former backyard, is a bastion of Greek gastronomy where this proves awkward. Though I’m half convinced a courgette ball packed with dill, or an eggplant slice, sautéed, and drizzled with extra virgin olive oil from Kalamata, may be flung at me from on high to remind me there can be only one Kitchen Goddess, I gird my loins, check the skies in case an olive pip is being aimed at my head, and go forth. 

You see, time after time, when in Cape Town, I return to The Greek Club Restaurant in Mouille Point, like Menelaus stumbling into Sparta with Helen under his arm after battling for 10 years in Troy. With relief, and an expectation of familial hospitality, I want to shout: “I’m home. Feed me, feed me!”

The Greek Club’s Helen Lourandos and Helen Comninos. Photo: Katya Kim Photography

While I would have preferred to liken myself to Helen of Troy rather than Menelaus, there are already two Helens in this story: Helen Comninos and Helen Lourandos, known colloquially as “The two Helens”, who are the brains and brawn at this home from home. 

“We started out serving Friday night family dinners for club members seven years ago and it just grew,” says Helen C. 

Be aware, this is no cosy, whitewashed space with sea-blue chairs and a photo of the Acropolis on the back wall. It’s also not a place to concern yourself about which fork to use for what dish or to ask for the salt politely over strained conversation. No. There is no need for Waspy self-restraint here. 

This is a brightly-lit hall in a sports club, where kids wreak havoc running around at full pitch, where your napkin can sit as well on your lap or tucked into your shirt. It’s a place you can jump up and kiss friends or family on both cheeks, leaving traces of lemon and lipstick, before diving back into the salty waters of your tender calamari or fresh linefish – usually red stumpnose, baked until the skin is crispy, then baptised with extra lemon and origanum. 

The Helens have transformed the hall – “it was a white elephant before” – into a buzzy, convivial venue which attracts a loyal crowd of chattering regulars as well as visitors. They are mainly local Greeks, of course. First-generation shopkeepers and self-made businessmen who arrived in the 1950s, or their university-educated, professional offspring, who now also bring their own children. Though this charmed third generation may know little of the austerity and alienation of their grandparents’ early years in a new country, they can nevertheless recognise when a tzatziki has just the right consistency of strained yoghurt, cucumber and garlic as it swirls in their mouths. They no doubt feel their genetic memory take a joyous leap back in time to a rural village, where old grannies in black hauled up fresh water from a well and cooked on an open flame, as they tuck into feta in phyllo pastry, scattered with sesame seeds and lashed with honey. 

Greek or not, all visitors soon find a common purpose: to taste the Helens’ four staple ingredients – “garlic, tomato, onion and origanum” – in the dishes before them. 

Roast lamb at The Greek Club. Photo: Katya Kim Photography

Try the roast lamb, pierced with garlic and slow-cooked in the oven for six hours, or the moussaka, layered with sliced potatoes, eggplant, minced beef in a tomato-based sauce then covered with béchamel sauce (or have it with baby marrows instead of the mince if you’re a vegetarian). Or the grilled kingklip with spinach in olive oil splashed with lemon. 

Says Helen C: “I learnt how to make fish from my late dad who equated cooking fish with a couple of life lessons: ‘Be patient, be passionate’. 

“Cooking with love takes time. We don’t rush things. It all comes from the heart.”

Baklava is the most popular dessert. “The trick is to pre-roast the nuts, and keep your pastry crisp. We pour the cold syrup on the hot pastry, it absorbs it better.”

Alas, the two Helens know about egos too: “Every Greek mama believes no one cooks like she does.” So sometimes they have to suit up with some armour: “We listen to valid criticism and sometimes we humour those who always know better. But occasionally, when it’s got out of hand, we have suggested to one or two that maybe they would prefer to go home and cook their own food.”

Helen confesses to me, “I still can’t make pastichio (a baked pasta dish with ground meat and béchamel sauce) like your mother.” 

What a relief! I could break into a dance knowing I can add that into this article. I’ve dodged an olive pip with my name on it. DM

The Greek Club Restaurant, 24 Bay Road, Mouille Point, 021 801 4514. Fridays: 1pm till late. Saturday and Sunday: 9.30am to 5pm. Also available for private events and functions.