New Scotts Valley spot has a unique take on Greek
Adbeen Karam has experience with Greek food. Not only did he grow up eating it at home, but his family owned a couple of restaurants in Palo Alto and Santa Clara. So when he opened Café Hanna a month and a half ago, he wanted to offer something a little different, specifically tapping into the lesser-known dishes his grandmother made him when he was a kid. He considers the new menu “Greek fusion,” not 100-percent traditional. We spoke to Karam, who co-owns Café Hanna with his wife Jamie Karam, about Scotts Valley’s newest restaurant.
GT: What’s your definition of ‘Greek fusion?’
ABDEEN KARAM: My grandmother is Greek and she married someone who is Syrian, so she took some of it and modified it a little bit. Souvlaki is typically on skewers. I used my grandmother’s recipes for the souvlaki, but when it came to cooking it, I’m cooking a whole chunk of meat and slicing it. That makes it a lot easier to eat in a sandwich. I’m taking the souvlaki, this herby taste of the meat—the only spice we put on the souvlaki is the pepper—and I’m putting it on a more middle eastern bread than the traditional Greek pita. The Greek pita is not the best pita out there. My favorite is this Iranian pita, it’s very close to the Syrian pita that my grandmother used to have.
What are some of the unique dishes on your menu?
The kind of restaurant I’m trying to build here, it’s something like you would go to somebody’s house and eat the food that they would serve you at home. My employees go crazy for the eggplant sandwich. We take eggplant and we marinate it in olive oil and bake it. And we use extra virgin olive oil. The Rhodes Rolls, I think more people like that than anything else. We take roasted chicken, then we sauté it with onions, then we roll it in thin bread and bake it. So the chicken is cooked three times. People are always asking me, are you sure this is chicken? We serve that with hummus and the green sauce.
What desserts do you have besides baklava?
I do a Zeus power bar. I ate this as a kid. There’s sesame seeds, almonds, pistachios, coconuts. We only put enough sugar to hold the bar together, but it’s gluten-free, and much less sugar than baklava. We also do a really nice mykonos fruit salad. We take the oranges and squeeze it fresh at the shop and marinate the fruit in it for a couple of hours and put a honey yogurt on top.
5272 Scotts Valley Drive, Scotts Valley. 708-8845. PHOTO: Adbeen and Jamie Karam of Café Hanna, with lamb souvlaki. CHIP SCHEUER
