Sunday, November 10, 2024

Symposium Greek restaurant opens in Wilmington

Symposium opened Wednesday offering a range of traditional Greek cuisine (Port City Daily photo/MICHAEL PRAATS)
Symposium opened Wednesday, offering a range of traditional Greek cuisine (Port City Daily photo / MICHAEL PRAATS)

WILMINGTON — Not every restaurant can say they offer guests a recipe that is 400-years old, but the newly opened Symposium Restaurant and Bar can.

Symposium is Wilmington’s newest Greek inspired restaurant located in Mayfaire and has plenty of uniquely European offerings for guests, including the 400-year-old recipe for Kleftiko.

According to the menu, the “Thieves Meal” known as Kleftiko comes from Mount Olympus and was the meal of choice for thieves who placed lamb, vegetables, feta cheese, and spices in the ground where it was slow cooked for five hours.

The restaurant is helmed by Chef George Papanikolaou and managed by his daughter Nina, who also operate another Greek restaurant in Wilmington, The Greeks.

Symposium offers guests a chance to try authentic Greek cuisine including a real Greek salad, which surprisingly has no lettuce, Nina said.

“The restaurant is more of a fine dining experience, all of the recipies are from my country, Greece, and everything is authentic. Here we are trying to do everything as authentically Greek as we can,” George said.

Symposium is not the Papanikolaou's first Greek restaurant in Wilmington, The Greeks was their first venture (Port City Daily photo/MICHAEL PRAATS)
Symposium is not the Papanikolaou’s first Greek restaurant in Wilmington, The Greeks was their first venture (Port City Daily photo/MICHAEL PRAATS)

Symposium is open for both lunch and dinner. While some of the names on the menu might sound foreign, George said many of the items on the menu are similar to other dishes across different cultures.

“A lot of people associate Greek food as only being gyros and breaking plates, but Greek cuisine has a humongous culture behind it. Many other cuisines have taken from Greek cuisine and made it their own, like Italian, French and even German cuisine,” George said. Unfortunately, a lot of Greek people have forgotten about our cuisine and stuck to just the basics.”

George said the reception to their first restaurant defied expectations that authentic Greek food would not work in Wilmington.

Symposium is open for both lunch and dinner and is currently running a limited menu for the time being (Port City Daily photo/MICHAEL PRAATS)
Symposium is open for both lunch and dinner and is currently running a limited menu for the time being (Port City Daily photo/MICHAEL PRAATS)

“We thank Wilmington for embracing us the way they did. The first thing we heard, before we opened The Greeks was that, ‘Greek food wouldn’t work here, that you’re not going to succeed, you are going to fail,’” he said.

“This menu might seem a little scary with the pronunciations and things like that, but a lot of it is familiar – it’s just different,” Nina said.

Symposium is open Monday-Thursday 11 a.m. – 10 p.m. and Friday-Saturday from 11 a.m. – 11 p.m. and located at 890 Town Center Drive in Mayfaire, next to the movie theater.


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