Though they studied different subjects in college (Grigoropoulos, for example, is an accountant), they all ended up in the restaurant business. For years, they wanted to open a restaurant together. Their hunt for a suitable location settled on a space in the Traville Gateway Center, a few blocks off Shady Grove Road in Rockville.
The three men and their families spent six months transforming the corner storefront into the Greek-style tapas -- known as meze -- restaurant of their dreams. Not only did they do the painting and decorating, they built the bar and the tables. Friends cautioned that the out-of-the-way location could be a detriment.
Boy, were they wrong.
Cava opened in November, and it's hard to imagine a more successful new enterprise.
This is Greek food as you will rarely find it: impeccably fresh ingredients, nothing too heavy or salty and everything gorgeously presented. For the most part, the preparations are traditional, not fanciful inventions with Greek ingredients. Moshovitis, who has spent time in the kitchens of Vidalia, Kinkead's, Bistro Bis and Flaps, has also mastered the art of timing dishes so they arrive in succession, rather than all at once.
The spinach pie (spanakopita) is not the leaden spinach mixture topped with a few layers of phyllo dough that you might find elsewhere, but exquisite, nearly greaseless phyllo triangles filled with a light mixture of nearly equal parts spinach and feta. Grilled meatballs are not dense balls of meat, but light savory patties -- so good that one of my guests ordered them for dessert.
The saganaki -- kefalograviera cheese doused with liquor and a hint of lemon that arrives at the table flaming -- is light but salty. Two slices of the fried cheese are served in separate little cast iron frying pans on a wooden paddle. Baked shrimp, plump, briny tasting and cooked just until done, are showered with feta in a light herb, tomato and garlic sauce and presented in a deep bowl. Use the pita bread (purchased, not made here) to sop up the sauce.
Zucchini fritters look like golden golf balls on a layer of tzatziki (yogurt cucumber sauce) but are creamy smooth inside. What Cava calls a crab cake is almost a misnomer -- these balls of jumbo lump crab have no filling and seem to be held together with sheer willpower. The mini-souvlaki has great-tasting marinated pork, but a tasteless tomato garnish, and there is a bit too much bread for the filling.
Dips and sauces are key elements in Greek foods, and the preparations here are exemplary. Garlic dip (skordalia) is cold mashed potatoes infused with garlic; the taste is pure garlic, the texture is grainy potato. Tzatziki has threads of cucumber mixed with rich yogurt. Taramosalata -- salmon roe, olive oil, garlic and lemon juice -- is buttery rich. A Cava invention, called crazy jalapeņo feta, may be feta-based, but it tastes more like Southern pimento cheese.
Not everything works. Tiropita (cheese pies) were greasy, too homogenized (goat cheese is mixed with the feta) and robbed of their distinctive taste. Stuffed cubanelle peppers, filled with arborio rice, feta and kefalograviera cheese, had the consistency and taste of dried, flavorless cottage cheese. A white pizza, served as a special at lunch one day, when two of three braised meat dishes were unavailable, tasted and looked reheated.
The star of the desserts is the loukoumades, puffs of dough not unlike beignets, drizzled with honey. The baklava, which isn't made in-house, is okay, but skip the chocolate version, a marriage of flavors that just doesn't work.
There is a dichotomy to the Cava operation that doesn't really work, either. On the one hand, it presents itself as a martini bar and therefore attracts large groups of (mostly female) twenty- and thirty-somethings, whose behavior can dominate the small restaurant. With those customers standing three or four deep at the bar, it is almost impossible for servers to make their way through the crowd from the kitchen to the dining area, or for diners to enter and leave.
The restaurant is small, seating about 60 people, and large groups don't seem to conform to standard amounts of seating time usually allotted for turning tables, and that often means long waits -- upwards of an hour on weekends -- even for those with reservations. Grigoropoulos said the waits usually don't exceed 20 to 25 minutes during the week.
Although Cava occupies a prime corner near Shady Grove Road, the entrance is at the rear, off the parking lot. There is a small waiting area with large trunks that offer seating. A long bar runs along one wall, with a flat-screen television above, and opposite the bar are several tables. On the street side of the space is a dining room filled with small tables. Floors are concrete, the window coverings feel like felt, the walls are sponge-painted dark brown, and the ceiling is black acoustic tile.
With all those hard surfaces, there is little to absorb the noise, and after an evening here, I felt the way I did when I'd screamed my way through a thrilling college football game in my youth: hoarse, happy and exhausted.
But Cava also has some nice touches. High on my list is good silverware. That may sound petty, but it's hard to take food seriously if it's presented with cutlery as flimsy as plastic. Here the hefty knives and forks almost exude an air of confidence.
Secondly, there are plenty of waiters and helpers to keep the food arriving and the dirty dishes departing. Both Xenohristos and Grigoropoulos spent four years waiting tables at Olazzo in downtown Bethesda. They learned well how to work a room. And they have plenty of backup help.
And finally, every plate -- and since these are tapas-size portions, there are hundreds of them a night -- is beautifully arranged and decorated. There are different shapes for different selections, all pristine white and gleamingly clean.
Cava, 9713 Traville Gateway Dr., Rockville,
301-309-9090. Reservations recommended. Hours: lunch, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30
p.m. Monday through Friday; dinner, 5 to 9:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday,
5 to 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 5 to 9 p.m. Sunday. Meze: $4.95 to
$12.95. Accessible to people with disabilities.http:/