Greek Retreat

What do travelers do when they return from far-off climes?

According to Konstantine Kabilafkas, whose family runs Corfu Island Greek Restaurant in Agoura Hills, travelers arrive home and head for the nearest restaurant serving the food of the land they just visited, to see how close the chef comes to the real stuff.

Such people seek to give substance to memory, of course, and when they show up in Kabilafkas’ dining room, he calls on the “two Greek mamas,” as he refers to them, in his kitchen.

One of them is the restaurant’s chef, Katerina Zernos. The other is Kabilafkas’ own mother, Magdaline Kabilafkas, who ordinarily works the cash register and serves as hostess but likes to pop into the kitchen to help cook up something special for a guest.

Like his mother, Konstantine’s father Timoleon hails from Peloponnesus, the peninsula that juts into the Ionian Sea west of Athens. When you go to the Kabilafkas’ restaurant, you get the real stuff indeed.

“You can go eat at someplace like McDonald’s or Burger King if what you want is to have your food shoved at you through a drive-up window,” Konstantine Kabilafkas says. “Or you can go someplace where people know you--like our restaurant.

“We opened Sept. 11, 1991, and our customers become our friends. Every year at Easter and Christmas, it’s not unusual for us to have 150 people in our back yard to roast a lamb on a spit.

“And we have people call up who have spent maybe their honeymoon in Greece and they want us to cook them something they had there--maybe some traditional dish and maybe something very unusual.”

The traditional dishes on the dinner menu include a lamb shank braised long enough to make the meat fall off the bone and served with a tomato sauce; a chicken dish with lemon and oregano called kotopoulo lemonato; lamb shoulder roasted with garlic and herbs; and pastitsio, a thick pasta filled with ground beef and topped with what the French would call bechamel (a white sauce).

Prices range below $14, as a rule.

For the adventurous, the restaurant offers a broiled shrimp souvlakia with lemon, olive oil, garlic and herbs for $14.95; a broiled salmon fillet topped with feta cheese, fresh tomatoes, onions and herbs for $16.50; and a broiled halibut steak marinated with Greek herbs and spices for $14.95.

Appetizers include stuffed grape leaves, deep-fried baby squid, Greek sausage cured in wine, and the not-to-be-missed melitzanosalata--baked eggplant with a special blend of herbs and lemon, served on pita. Appetizer prices range below $5, as a rule.

Corfu Island Greek Restaurant does a big lunch business during the week, drawing people from the many office buildings that line the Ventura Freeway between Chesebro Road and Lindero Canyon Road on the way to Thousand Oaks. The restaurant serves dinner seven nights a week, and on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays musician George Marneros plays a lute-like Greek stringed instrument called the bouzouki.

Corfu Island Greek Restaurant is at 30135 Agoura Road, Agoura Hills, (818) 879-8440.

* Juan Hovey writes about the restaurant scene in the San Fernando Valley and outlying points. He may be reached at (805) 492-7909 or fax (805) 492-5139 or via e-mail at JHovey@compuserve.com