Review: Expensive and perplexing, Nisos Mediterranean falls flat where it counts — the food

Like nearly everything at Nisos Mediterranean in the West Loop, the moussaka is gorgeous, expensive and perplexing.

Chef Avgeria Stapaki takes the homey layered dish of eggplant, stewed ground meat and potatoes, and transforms it into a visually stunning showstopper. Instead of a square, she wraps the beef mixture into a cylinder, with thin slices of roasted eggplant, and serves a handful of crispy potato straws on the side. When the server brings it out, a fog of dry ice wafts from the edges of the dish.

Moussaka has never looked so svelte.

The dish is also $28, and while the fog apparently has a cinnamon tea aroma, the server removes the plate from your table immediately after serving you an individual portion, suggesting it was there mostly for show, rather than sensory enhancement. While the flavor is all there, deconstructing moussaka also accentuates the mushiness of the eggplant and stewed beef.

This sort of scene plays out again and again at Nisos, a restaurant with genuine ambition and fascinating creative twists, but one where the substance doesn’t live up to the premium you pay for the presentation.

As explained in detail on the first page of the restaurant’s menu, this is the latest project from Parker Hospitality and CEO Brad Parker. You probably know him best from The Hampton Social, which opened in 2015. That restaurant’s success has led to seven other locations across the country, along with two more in the works. (Parker Hospitality also just announced plans for a Tulum-focused Mexican restaurant set to open one block over in the Fulton Market District next summer.)

While noted for its fizzy, eye-catching atmosphere, The Hampton Social was never a particularly ambitious restaurant in terms of prestige, which made the announcement of Nisos surprising. But Parker leaned into it, describing Nisos as his passion project. He certainly spared no expense. While on a restaurant research trip in Europe, he fell in love with Stapaki’s cooking at Principote Mykonos on the Greek island of Mykonos. Though he could have tried to replicate the experience in Chicago with local chefs, he decided to hire Stapaki and relocate her here.

If nothing else, Parker certainly nailed the atmosphere. Curving indentations run along the walls, bringing to mind the lapping waves of the Aegean Sea. At night, colored lights dance along the dining room, as if reflecting off the water. It’s the sort of place that somehow attracts beautiful people, and to such an absurd degree, my dining partner confessed at one point, “I feel like a five in a room full of 10s.”

Nisos is also huge. While there’s a decently sized dining room on the first floor, the upstairs stretches all the way to the corner of Randolph and Halsted streets, above Au Cheval and its enduring line of customers trailing down the sidewalk. With such a stunning setting, this could have been simply a loungey spot for grabbing cocktails and nibbling on mezze platters with friends. But Nisos wants to be more than that. It wants to serve a $59 king crab salad, $70 langoustines and whole fish priced per kilogram. (Since my two visits, the salad and langoustines have been removed from the menu.)

Though Nisos intentionally avoids being called a Greek restaurant, the menu bulges with dishes from that country, from tiropita and taramasalata to moussaka and rizogalo. Chicago has seen a surge of ambitious new Greek restaurants, from Andros Taverna and Lýra to the ever-expanding Avli empire and the more casual Kala. But none has food that looks like Nisos’.

Take the tzatziki, which is as thick and creamy as hummus, thanks to the use of Stapaki’s imported yogurt of choice. “In Greece, we call the yogurt found (in the United States) dessert yogurt,” Stapaki said. “The yogurt I want is very thick and rich. That’s why it has this structure and body.” Instead of raw garlic, she uses fermented black garlic along with fermented cucumber juice. The result is luxuriously smooth, making for a fantastic start to the meal.

I also enjoyed the fish roe-topped taramasalata, served with crackly carob chips. Triangular feta- and Gruyere-stuffed tiropita, however, featured an oddly tough, empanada-like crust.

My favorite bite was probably the sea bream ceviche, which pairs the firm raw fish with a delightfully fresh and sweet cubed watermelon, with the slight zing of roasted chiles. Was the proportion of fish to watermelon tiled toward the latter? For sure. But the light and refreshing flavors are there.

Much less successful is the octopus, which features thin slices of the cephalopod set atop pureed fava beans. This makes for a convenient presentation, but by the time my plate arrived, those slices had lost all their heat and were mushy.

But the most baffling part of the experience is the menu itself. Fortunately, it has been updated since my visits in mid-November, so seafood dishes are no longer spread haphazardly over four different sections (For the Table, Raw, From the Sea and Fish Display). For the Table has been split into Signature Starters and a selection To Share. The octopus is now a $34 starter, rather than topping the ambiguous From the Sea section. But I still remain flummoxed over the vegetable side dishes grouped as Hearthy, a word I’ve never encountered.

There are a few meatier options in the From the Land section. I tried the half-poussin (no longer on the menu), which was reasonably juicy, though the mushroom mixture stuffed inside was needlessly dry. (The chicken entree has switched to a roasted boneless chicken, also available in half or whole portions.)

But there’s no doubt the main focus at Nisos is seafood. This brings us to the fish display located on the second floor. There you’ll see an array of whole fish on ice, many of which were flown in from the Mediterranean Sea. As is customary for a display like this, you have to order the whole fish, which gets expensive fast. There are no prices on the menu, just a sign that says everything is market price. Fortunately, the servers will happily walk through the expected cost of each fish, which genuinely is helpful.

It’s hard to deny the quality of the juicy, white-fleshed sea bream. But even though the server made a show of boning the fish tableside, I still had to contend with over a dozen small bones, which is not ideal when you’re shelling out $126 per kilogram. (By the way, I’m all for the nationwide adoption of the metric system, but not breaking this down in pounds — there’s about 2.2 for every kilogram — feels like another intentionally confusing move.)

I’d stay away from the cocktail menu completely. The drinks were designed by the folks behind The 7 Jokers, an acclaimed bar in Athens. Having never been there, I can’t vouch for the drink quality in person, but I assume something got lost over the Atlantic, because all the ones I tried were baffling. The Nobody, described on the menu as a “rich botanical negroni,” is served with a distracting amount of smoke. The Circe claims to be “herbal and uplifting,” but the addition of matcha tea dried out my palate. The God of the Sun, which features mezcal, chile and pineapple, was watery and unbalanced.

Stick to the wine list, which has a number of solid wines by the glass, including some fantastic white options from Greece. Though it’s not on the menu, my server suggested the Santorini Assyrtiko 2021, a lovely and bracing white.

As you’d expect, desserts are visually impressive, if unevenly executed. That includes Pavlova’s cheesecake, which arrives crowned with a circular meringue and a dusting of raspberry powder. It’d be a must-order if the strawberry sorbet hadn’t been so bland.

There are enough flashes of creativity to prove that Stapaki is an enormously talented chef, and it’s good to see that the restaurant is already adjusting (even if the pace of the adjustment is a bit disorienting). But as it stands, Nisos might actually be too reminiscent of a vacation to the Greek Island of Mykonos: the jaw-dropping views are free, but you’ll pay dearly for everything else.

nkindelsperger@chicagotribune.com

802 W. Randolph St.

312-584-0288

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nisosmediterranean.com

Tribune rating: Good, 1 star

Open: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m.; closed Monday.

Prices: Starters, $9 to $34; entrees, $28 to $118 and above

Noise: Lively when packed

Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible, with bathrooms on the first floor

Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.