Greece and Turkey, Together on One Menu at Iris

The chef John Fraser’s latest Manhattan restaurant breaks the unwritten rule that Aegean cooking has to be predictable.

It has not been hard to find Greek food of very high quality in Midtown Manhattan since at least the 1990s, when Estiatorio Milos dropped anchor. What was much harder to find, whether at Milos or at the other restaurants that followed it, was food that would surprise you. It became a matter of dogma that superior Greek food had to be minimal, elemental and largely unadorned. You might pay $90 for a plate of fish to which nothing more had been applied than sea salt, lemon juice and the heat of a grill. Sometimes it seems that fans of these restaurants pay that kind of money precisely because the cooking is predictable. Without once looking at the menu, they can dine in complete confidence that they will never be served anything that wasn’t deeply familiar to Aristotle. Iris came splashing into this tranquil Aegean Sea in April after waiting out the worst months of the pandemic. It shares many traits with its forerunners Milos, Molyvos and Limani, all roughly east of Iris’s berth on Broadway in the mid-50s: the mezze, the grill, the seafood captured somewhere in the Mediterranean, the prices that occasionally drift into expense-account territory.