Your guide to Greek pastries in Middlesbrough

If you have walked down Dundas Street and glanced at a counter full of golden pastries you could not quite name, this guide is for you. Greek pastries in Middlesbrough are not something you see on every corner, and at The Greek Spot everything on that counter is made with Greek recipes and baked fresh every morning.

Greek baking really splits into two camps, sweet and savoury, and a lot of it is built on phyllo, the paper thin pastry we stretch by hand. Some of the sweets are siropiasta, which means they are soaked in warm syrup after baking. Here is what everything is, so you can walk up and order like you have done it before.

Start with the savoury side

Not everything Greek and golden is a dessert. A good chunk of our counter is savoury, built around phyllo stretched by hand each morning. The star here is bougatsa. In some parts of Greece bougatsa is a custard pie, but ours is the savoury version, a warm parcel of phyllo filled with feta and mizithra cheese. It is rich, a little salty and very hard to stop eating.

Alongside it you will usually find other savoury phyllo pies on the changing counter, the sort of thing a Greek bakery turns out every day. Spanakopita is spinach and feta wrapped in phyllo, and tiropita is the all cheese version. If you spot peinirli, that is a boat shaped baked dough filled with cheese, a Greek cousin of pizza that is lovely torn and shared.

• Bougatsa, feta and mizithra, £5.00
• Cheese pastry with sesame and honey, £5.30
• Double sausage and cheese brioche, £5.00
• Potato roll, £4.70

The syrup sweets, known as siropiasta

Now the sweet half. Many of the best known Greek sweets are siropiasta, which simply means soaked in syrup. The pastry is baked first, then bathed in warm syrup so it drinks it up and turns sticky and glossy. Baklava is the one most people know, layers of phyllo packed with walnuts and cinnamon, and it is the reason people go looking for baklava in Middlesbrough in the first place. Ours is £5.00 and does exactly what good baklava should.

Portokalopita is the one to try if baklava feels too familiar. It is a Greek orange cake, light and open in texture and soaked in citrus syrup, and it is also £5.00. Galaktoboureko is the quiet showstopper, a silky semolina custard baked inside phyllo and finished with syrup, somewhere between a custard slice and baklava. Our syruped walnut cake, again £5.00, rounds out the syrup soaked corner.

Kataifi nests and the little sweets

Kataifi looks like fine golden thread, and that is more or less what it is, phyllo pulled into thin strands. We wind it into small nests, fill them with cream or nuts, then syrup them, and they come three to a portion. They are the easy way in if you fancy something sweet without committing to a whole slice.

None of it comes out of a packet. As a Greek bakery in Middlesbrough, everything is made here with Greek recipes and baked fresh in the morning, which is why the counter looks a little different from one day to the next.

• Pistachio nests, £5.20
• Praline cream nests, £5.20
• Bueno cream nests, £4.90
• Caramel cream nests, £4.90
• Chocolate wafer cones, £3.20

Where to find Greek pastries in Middlesbrough

You will find us at 41 Dundas Street, right in the middle of Middlesbrough, a short walk from Centre Square, the Cleveland Centre and Teesside University. The cafe is open Monday to Saturday from 9am to 4pm, and it is an easy spot for authentic Greek food in Middlesbrough whether you want one pastry with a coffee or a box to share.

Pastries go well with a proper Greek coffee. A freddo espresso, iced and shaken until smooth, is £4.20, and a Greek frappe is £4.00, both made the way you would get them back home in Greece. Come in, take a slow look at the counter and ask us anything. That is exactly what it is there for.