I had an epiphany of sorts this weekend.

I decide on where I'm going to review like this: hearing stuff; reading stuff; driving around and eyeballing promising-looking joints; receiving press releases or calls from restaurants; reader recommendations. People tell me things--my hair stylist, the lawn guy, they all have a restaurant they think I should write about.

Problem is, sometimes they're wrong (not dissing you, hair stylist, so no revenge cuts!). I drive for miles, battling traffic and my own terrible navigational skills, only to slog through a ho-hum meal. What's the point of telling St. Petersburg Times readers NOT to go to a little, out-of-the-way restaurant they would never have known about were it not for my ink? Who does this serve?

Still, it seems wasteful that I've spent lots of time and the paper's cash to no end. Here's the epiphany part:

I'm going to write short descriptions of the "outtakes." Meaning, for restaurants I visit that are good, but maybe not worthy of a full-length review, this is where they'll get a little play.

See below for my first one.

Friday night I went to Panos Kouzina (3101 State Road 580, Safety Harbor, 727/797-2667). Two different readers had recommended it. Casual, in a teeny strip mall on 580, it's a pleasant room with unclothed tables and a wide bank of windows at the front. Cuisine is largely Greek, very moderately priced. We started with a sampler platter--very respectable spanikopita, tyropita (like the spinach phyllo ones, but just filled with feta) taramasalata (it's a dip made mostly of carp roe), a couple of dolmas, warm Middle Eastern bread wedges and pleasant tzatziki. A good start, nice flavors.

Then a French onion soup, the liquid tasting something of the industrial canned beef broth, topped with a softly disintegrating round of baguette and a browned layer of molten cheese. Fine, fairly workhorse. The Greek salad (we chose sans potato salad) was awash in Greek dressing and a flurry of feta. Here's something I wouldn't say in a review in the paper, because it's unscientific and a little gross: French and Bulgarian feta are dee-lish, to my mind not as bitey as Greek feta. Greek, especially cheaper Greek feta, has a slightly barfy taste sometimes. That flavor and red onion dominated the salad in a somewhat unpleasant way.

From there, we tried a chicken souvlaki and one of the many veal dishes. The former came accompanied by a nice heap of golden french fries, but the chicken itself had too much going on to be entirely enjoyable: crumbles of feta, a tart vinegrette, onions, etc. It would have been better simply grilled with a less assertive marinade. The accompanying tzatziki was eclipsed. The veal, while it tasted good, had a strangely viscous brown sauce on it that didn't add much.

Alright, I know I'm sounding pretty negative. Prices were good, service was reasonable, the dining room was pleasant enough--and it's good to see a Greek/Med. place doing a fairly brisk business in Safety Harbor. But if they want to compete with some of the Tarpon Springs contenders, they're going to have to retool a little.