Back in the day, it used to be that when you didn't fancy cooking (or you were too lazy to shop), your choices were cheap takeaway or a posh restaurant.
Now, of course, you have restaurants that charge a lot of money for takeaway food (hi, Five Guys!), and takeaways that charge a lot of money for fine restaurant quality food. It's no longer just a steakhouse or chippy on a Friday night. Thanks to delivery apps like Deliveroo and UberEats, someone-else-cooking has all sort of blurred into one with various options and price points.
Santorini Bar & Grill is the latter option - restaurant grade food which is available to take away. The Greek spot does have a dine in restaurant, and it is a (slightly confusingly) Japanese feeling place adorned with cherry blossom decorations with Parisian style tables outside on the street. I don't know if they have cherry blossoms in Greece but I suppose they have outdoor dining.
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For this review, I opted for takeaway, and I wanted to road test some Grecian favourites after picking up a taste for it in Rhodes. Having eaten the real thing in Greece, I was keen to see if Headingley could hope to match the taste of real Greek dishes just a few miles from my house.
It didn't get off to a great start. Because I have gut rot (Coeliac disease), I needed the Gluten Free menu. And credit where it's due, Santorini has a Gluten Free menu and it's all cooked separately. Unfortunately, the process of actually ordering some food is made needlessly complicated for allergen folk like me. Normal people can order on the website or over the phone from the normal menu for collection or delivery.
But the GF menu isn't available for online orders OR over the phone OR on any of the order apps, hilariously, so I had to physically drive to the restaurant and order in person. Which meant it took a lot longer to get the food cooked and led to a lot of waiting around taking pictures of the restaurant when I should have been able to pop in and out, or better yet, just get it delivered.
Fortunately, the food is worth the wait. I went for the Mixed Souvlaki, which is a skewer of marinated lamb fillet and chicken, grilled and served with basmati rice. Alongside that, I had a beef Stifado, which is kind of like a half tomato/half gravy beef stew, and a side of Halloumi fries (absolutely compulsory).
The Stifado is absolutely divine. Succulent, melt-in-your-mouth tender beef which has the consistency of a brisket or 'pulled beef' as the kids probably call it, with generous lashings of sauce and sliced potatoes. It's hearty, yet it doesn't feel as heavy as a thick British stew.
The souvlaki is basically a mixed meat box and rice. Lovely chargrilled chicken and lamb which tastes smoky and flavourful in equal measure, and some pretty decent flavoured rice. In all, it's quite a lot of good quality meat, which explains the price really - £17.95 for the souvlaki and £16.95 for the Stifado, and another £6.50 for the halloumi fries.
The Halloumi is, btw, exquisite. Chewy, salty cheese strips heavily fried on both sides but still squidqy in the middle. And this is all Gluten Free.
In all, two mains and a side set me back £41.40 which considering that I drove there and back for it myself, is hardly 'cheap' for a takeaway. But this is the exact same food served in the sit-down restaurant, and it is infinitely more and better quality meat than you'd get in your average burger/fries/kebab sort of place. So you do get what you pay for. And of course, finding food of this quality that doesn't make my insides bleed is a huge deal for me.
It's worth mentioning that I have been here as a restaurant before and I always found the service snappy and the option to eat on the street on a warm day worth taking up.
There's a few gripes with the order system but the food makes up for it and if you're looking for good, non-greasy Grecian grub, Santorini is well worth a look in before your next Otley Run.
Santorini Bar & Grill, Otley Road, Headingley, Leeds
Mixed souvlaki £17.95
Beef Stifado £16.95
Halloumi £6.50
Total £41.40
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