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Last week, we enjoyed our finest meal of 2023.

We often rave in this column about a particular dish or chef or service staff.

We’ve also been known to carry on like a pork chop on occasion over a restaurant, particularly some of the new crop of restaurants which have been startlingly good this year.

But if the benchmark for a best-ever restaurant experience is happiness and a wholly enriching experience, Yiamas at Subiaco is our best of 2023.

Walking into the loud jumble of guests and staff was enough to get the blood racing. Walking out two hours later the lift in one’s spirits was more profound than gobbling down a ute load of SSRIs.

Restaurants do lots of good things for humanity. They can even make you feel good, but they rarely make happiness a transcendent experience.

So, what the hell did Yiamas get so right?

Firstly, the food was seriously on point and difficult to fault.

We’ve had Greek food in Greece multiple times and, while there’s nothing wrong with a chip-filled yiros or grilled fish at a beachside hut, there’s nothing about Hellenic cuisine that’s gonna float your trireme.

Then there’s Yiamas’ spirit. It’s joyful, unpretentious and come-as-you-are.

We kicked off with cod fritters. These lightly fried morsels were not your typical bechamel-based glue with an occasional fleck of baccala. Au contraire.

They were filled with chunks of flaky cod, seasoned with lemon and salt and coated with a light, crunchy batter. Every now and then, you’d get a hit of dill. Best ever.

Sour cherry dolmades were unexpected and superb. Again, not your typical, brine-soaked rice ball wrapped in soggy, vinegary vine leaves.

Impeccable flavour is difficult to describe. Suffice it to say, the balance between sour vinegar, well deployed salt, chewy vine leaves and bombastic, bold flavour was as near perfect as it gets.

The vine leaf wraps were sitting in a pool of lemon scented and seasoned olive oil. We mopped and mopped and mopped until there was none of the glorious unction left. We kept looking at each other and mouthing the wow thing like children.

Koupes is a haloumi-filled cheese ball. It apparently originates from Cyprus. My first taste of haloumi was in its homeland and Yiamas’ version reminded me of it, not the rubbery salt lick usually served in Australia.

Sidebar story: I had arrived in Larnaca harbour in the middle of the night. Next morning I ambled off the boat, checked in at customs and took a first look at Cyprus.

Just outside the security gates at the marina was an older gent with a cart grilling up haloumi panini. It was my first taste of the mint-filled cheese. I was hooked.

I mention this because the haloumi we enjoyed at Yiamas was a reminder of the stretchy, creamy sheep and goat-milk cheese made in the mountains of Cyprus.

It was rubbery, which is the point of haloumi, but not so much that you could play racquetball with it, which is often the case.

We followed up with Greek sausages. We were unaware the Greeks had a history of bangers, but there they were. Four little snorkers tightly encased in a skin that snapped when bitten into, and full of juices and meat and chunks of fat. Flavour!

We were all for jumping up then and there and dancing the Sirtaki to the tune of multiple bouzouki. We were a little emotional.

A roast chicken main course could have been dry, flaccid from being cooked too far in advance and with meat the pallid grey of a cadaver.

Not here. It was charred a deep golden, almost black. Its skin was puckeringly salty and strongly flavoured with herbs. I suspect it had been brined before roasting: it had a tell-tale sweetness about its flesh and was so juicy it dripped like a busted radiator.

There’s a lot of fine roast chicken in this town. This is one of the best. Superb.

Yiamas also gets points for its opening hours. It bucks the “closed Sunday and Monday” trend, instead closing on Tuesday and Wednesday.

This means that Sunday evening dinner is available and very welcome. Monday, in particular, is the day hospo shuts down in Perth, so Yiamas is a godsend at the beginning of the week, too.

Yiamas’ kitchen can sing the high notes and pluck the bass guitar at the same time. It can do big flavour and assured technique.

Sure, it’s casual and it’s simple, but rarely have we tasted dishes so full of palate-wrenching flavour and expertise.

It’s as Greek as dodgy credit default swaps. It’s also as Greek as those haunting notes from a bouzouki across a hot plaka on a warm night.

We fell in love with Yiamas.