The pita arrived first, a hot, lopsided dome the size of a side plate, blistered and leopard-spotted, and L was wide awake and absolutely not interested in sitting still.
That was Wednesday at Kallos Cafe & Wine Bar, 5 Bankside Boulevard in Salford. The plan was modest: park nearby, eat well, keep things low stress with a three-month-old in tow, and be home before anything turned into a meltdown. We managed all three, and came away with a backlog of dishes I now need to try and replicate.
Why meze, with a toddler
The room helps. High ceilings, properly high, the kind you get in converted basement spaces under glass towers, with music pitched at conversation level rather than above it. The smell of oregano and grilled dough hits you on the way in. Nothing screams be quiet, this is serious. Kallos has been picked up by the Michelin Guide but feels like a wine bar that happens to cook properly, not a restaurant trying to behave like one.
The bigger help was the format. Meze is a one-handed style of eating. Small plates land steadily, nothing demands your full attention the second it arrives, and most things can be torn, dipped, and chewed while the other hand is keeping an active, lively toddler from redecorating the table. L did her usual midweek arc: bouncy and vocal through the first plates, drowsy by the second round, fully gone by the time the tinned fish arrived. From shoulder to pram in one slow, practised manoeuvre, and back to the pita.
The pita I now have to reverse-engineer
The pita was the thing. £4 for Pita bread, sea salt, oregano on the menu, and what arrived was closer to a Neapolitan pizza dough than the flatbread that word usually conjures. Massively inflated, a full dome, leopard-spotted across the top with the kind of charred blisters you only get from serious heat. Glossy with olive oil, dusted with oregano, soft and steamy inside when you tore it open.
I have a pizza oven at home and the pita has immediately joined the list of things I need to try and chase. Hydration, ferment time, launch temperature, how thin you roll the centre before it goes in. The dome, the full separation, the giraffing of the crust. This is the hardest part to pin down and I suspect it will take a few batches of failed flatbread before it starts to make sense. Worth every one.
Tinned fish, treated with respect
Kallos’s other obsession is tinned fish. Premium tinned fish, on the menu, which is a phrase that splits a room. This is not cupboard tuna. It is heritage Portuguese and Spanish conservas, served warm with the same pita, an aioli (incredible), pickled chilli, and a wedge of lemon.
We had a Nuri spiced mackerel in olive oil. Rich, gently spicy, deep in that particular savoury way that only comes from heritage producers taking their time. The combination on the fork, warm bread, cool aioli, mackerel, a pinprick of pickled chilli, sharp lemon, was the kind of thing that made me stop talking mid-sentence.
The good news, and the bad news, is that most of these tins appear to be available to order online, possibly direct from the restaurant too. Which means a small Portuguese cardboard box is almost certainly already on its way to the house.
The tzatziki alongside it deserves a mention too. Simple, clean, properly made, a thread of golden olive oil on top. The kind of thing that disappears without fanfare and you only notice it is gone when the pita runs out.
The lamb flatbread
I nearly forgot about this one, and in a way that is honest feedback. We ordered the Lamb shoulder, lutenitsa, myzithra cheese and chilli oil flatbread, and it was lovely. The problem was temperature: the pita underneath was hotter than the meat on top, and with the cheese set on top as it is, I suspect that is partly by design. But the warmth the dish needed to carry the lamb’s flavour just was not there. I love lamb, I crave it, and I think this one deserves a return visit with fresh eyes and a more forgiving table, one where it is not competing with a chickpea stew I cannot stop thinking about.
The chickpea stew I will be chasing for months
The standout, though, was the simplest plate on the table. Chickpea stew, Greek oregano, lemon. Vegan, gluten free, almost embarrassingly simple on paper.
In the bowl it was something else. Soft chickpeas, slow heat, olive oil, and then real Greek oregano doing the work: that resinous, warm, almost floral note that bears no relation to the powdered version most of us grew up with. A squeeze of lemon over the top to lift the whole thing. It tasted like a recipe that had quietly evolved over a few generations rather than been workshopped on a dev kitchen Tuesday.
This one I think I can crack at home. Good chickpeas, properly cooked. Real Greek oregano, sourced properly, not whatever is in the jar at the back of the cupboard. Time. Lemon at the end, not in the pot. I will report back.
The honey feta parcel
The first plate to land was Feta wrapped in filo, honey, sesame. Screaming hot, crisp golden pastry giving way to molten salty feta, sesame on top, a slow drizzle of honey over the surface and a swimming pool of it underneath. It is the kind of dish that needs no explanation and brooks no argument.
Kallos posted a reel of it that captures the moment the honey hits the pastry better than any photo I took.
A quietly excellent room
That is the thing about Kallos. There is no theatre. The room is alive but not loud. Servers know their tins and tell you which one to pick. Plates come when they are ready. Drinks are served without ceremony. A toddler asleep on a shoulder is a non-event, not a problem.
The take-home list
Three things came home with me, in no particular order.
- A list of pita and dough variables to test in the pizza oven this summer.
- Following Kallos on Instagram, partly for the food, mostly as a reminder to go back and eat there again.
- A sleeping toddler, transferred cleanly from shoulder to pram to car seat to cot, without waking once.
What was meant to be a quick midweek dinner turned into one of those evenings that quietly embeds itself in memory.
By the time we left, the chickpeas, the mackerel, and the pita dome were still going around in my head. That, and when we are going back.