Abigail F.
Yelp
I always enjoy supporting restaurants that are an "institution"--the family-owned place that makes things according to recipes passed down, that's been around unchanged forever. (That's why New Day is my favorite spot in Eugene, for example.) Poppi's opened before I was born, and the atmosphere is super charming. I also saw a picture on the wall of Poppi herself, who passed away recently; I'm sorry for their loss. This all makes me feel bad saying the truth... but honestly, I was so unimpressed by the quality of the food relative to the price point that I can't imagine returning.
First of all, I don't quite understand the Greek-Indian hybrid for a restaurant concept. Greek-Albanian or Greek-Turkish, perhaps. I looked at their website wondering if there's some special story behind it, but found nothing. Can they narrate the history of the restaurant a bit, so we're not so puzzled about the hybrid?
Here's what I tried:
-Spanakopita plate. The spanakopita needed quite a lot of salt. The filo on the top wasn't crispy, but soggy. Perhaps it needed a thicker layer on top. (Tradewinds spanakopita is much better.) It came with two sides crammed onto a small plate: potatoes in tomato sauce, which tasted like plain boiled potatoes with passata almost directly out of the carton and scarcely cooked, and zucchini and onions with dried herbs, which were adequately salted but quite undercooked and crunchy. Both side dishes reminded me of student co-op style. This should not be a $20 dish.
-Sampler of appetizers. Pita was good and they serve a lot of it. The eggplant dip is so aggressively garlicky that it's hard to taste anything else, including the flavor of eggplant. It would have been delicious if that flavor were scaled back; it was very close. Artichoke hearts didn't have much flavor, although they were pleasant to eat; I assume they must make them fresh, but the experience wasn't that different from the kind you can get in a jar, so I didn't quite get it. Could they be grilled or something? Dolmas were decent, a bit understuffed and floppy and mostly flavored with tons of dried mint and no other flavors come through. (I'm picky about dolmas bc it's my absolute favorite food and I make very good ones myself on special occasions.)
-My friend got a pork chop, which was served without a sauce on top of plain rice with a salad. I can't review meat dishes since I'm a veg-head, but he was disappointed that the dish just seemed plain, dry, three disconnected elements without much concept of how they interact, and with no sauce for the rice/meat.
Service is fast and friendly, and again, I feel bad saying all this but it's ca. $30/person here and I want to be served food that's better than I can make at home. If they're charging upscale, they need to strive to be upscale.
This place reminds me of Beppe and Gianni's. It's a Eugene institution, family owned, cute as can be, and it's been around forever so no one wants to criticize it. But being the only Greek place in town doesn't stir up enough competition that they're really attentive to the quality of the food relative to the price. If the price point is lower, my expectations change dramatically.