A dreamy N.H. diner
Steve's Diner
100 Portsmouth Ave.
Exeter, N.H.
603-772-5733
Open daily, 6 a.m- 8 p.m.
All major credit cards accepted.
Handicapped accessible.
No alcohol is served.
First we'll start with dessert. We did have a great meal at Steve's Diner recently, but our homemade éclair ($2.25) was so superlative that we need to talk about that right off the bat so that visitors to this eatery will save plenty of room at the end of their meals.
One spoonful of this amazing dirigible of crusty pastry, golden custard, and real chocolate drizzle was the madeleine that transported us to the bakeries of our childhoods. Honestly, we've eaten so many mediocre, rubbery, store-bought éclairs we forgot what they were supposed to taste like. Folks, they're supposed to taste like this. And so it was no surprise to learn that Steve Fountis, who opened the diner in December with his wife Lisa, once ran a New York bakery.
OK, now we can back up to the beginning. This diner is in a former Pizza Hut the Fountises jazzed up with chrome plating on the outside and nice lighting on the inside. It still looks like a Pizza Hut, but for all we care it could look like a Quonset hut if they just keep serving up that food.
We started our meals with homemade soup, a cup of avgolemono (Greek egg lemon) soup ($2.50) and a bowl of French onion ($3.50). We chuckled a bit when we saw the onion soup, which instead of baked gruyere on top of croutons, had a thin piece of Swiss cheese laid on the top. Nonetheless, the soup was a hearty peppery broth with a nice sweet flavor. The homemade croutons swim inside.
The egg lemon soup was spot on with its sunshine color, creamy texture, and its little bite of citrus.
There are a lot of comfort diner foods available at Steve's at breakfast, lunch, and dinner including stuffed French toast with cream cheese and fruit ($7.45), ham steak platters ($7), egg salad sandwich ($5.65), and liver and onions ($7). But we were drawn to the Greek selections on the menu.
Had we gone for breakfast, we likely would have tried the Greek omelet with feta, tomato, and olives ($6.45), but this being lunchtime we were able to chose from some of the Greek entrees on the menu.
We were tempted by the Greek platter ($11), which included spinach pie, loukaniko (Greek sausage), feta cheese, dolmathes (stuffed grape leaves), tzatziki, and pita bread, but gyro was calling to one of us.
So we went with one gyro platter that included rice and salad ($7) and one spinach pie platter with rice and Greek salad ($7.45).
Consider this fair warning. The portions at Steve's are epic. We watched as a fellow diner was presented with what looked like a satellite dish of American chop suey ($7), one of the specials of the day.
Our platters were equally robust. Even though it wasn't on the menu listing, the spinach pie not only had the rice and Greek salad that was promised but also two mini cigar-shaped stuffed grape leaves. And every morsel of everything on that plate was terrific.
We've eaten plenty of spanikopita in our lives, but this version of the Greek spinach pie was by far the best. The phyllo dough crust tasted distinctly homemade. It was not overly greasy like so much phyllo is, and each layer was delicately tasty. The use of fresh instead of frozen spinach gave it an amazing earthy taste. Finally, the feta was not crumbled throughout the spinach, but rather laid down in nice-size chunks.
The small Greek salad with an excellent homemade dressing, and the rice with a warm taste of nutmeg, were the perfect complement.
We felt the same way about the gyro platter with its ample serving of the mysterious and minty meat/lamb rotisserie alongside salad and the rice. The only small suggestion we have would be to serve the platter with some pita bread.
So now we're back to dessert. There are the éclairs, of course, but there are new offerings every day. Next time we're going for the baklava ($2.75).
TOM LONG 