Euro trip food post - southern Greece segment
For the last day of my long weekend, i went for a bike ride. I zoomed out along the river to Bali and paddled my feet in the sea at the secret beach behind the shipping port, nibbling on 芋仔冰 taro icecream, 甘蔗汁 cane juice, 仙草 grass jelly and a 自助餐便當 buffet bento lunch featuring various greens and tofus on rice. I don't think i've ever enjoyed ordinary everyday Taiwanese food so much, since it's the first real meal i've eaten out since i got back. I think i really missed the flavor profiles of the food here.
But let's take a last look at Greek cuisine, through a few of the meals i had in the Peloponnese and Attica. Be prepared, this is a long one. Keep a snack handy, because if you're anything like me, reading about food just makes you more hungry.
You might remember for my last supper in Thessaloniki i had tacos. Well, for my first bite in Patras, i also had tacos. Or, to be more specific ντάκος (ntakos), which is pronounced "dakos" (rhymes with tacos). This is a dish completely unrelated to Mexican tacos. It's apparently from Crete, and it is made from a barley rusk topped with olive oil, tomatoes, feta and oregano. It's similar to what i ate for breakfast every day in Andalucía in Spain, which was lightly toasted bread with olive oil, chopped tomatoes and salt. This sounds too simple to be worth bothering with, but if you have really good tomatoes, it's divine. Most countries i lived do not have really good tomatoes. But Spain does, and so does Italy, and Greece. This dish was the freshest and most pleasing thing i ate in Greece, and i went back to it a few times when i noticed it hiding at the bottom of the salads section of the menu.
A less fresh but still satisfying dish was this grilled vege platter i ordered at an ouzo/meze joint. Everything is grilled with - i think - a drizzle of honey on it for sweetness and better caramelization. The white thing on top is haloumi. As you can see, it's almost impossible to get vegan food in Greece. Forget the honey, most vege stuff comes with cheese on it, or yogurt, or some other thing forced out of an enslaved animal's boobs. I am a bit of an odd flexitarian in that i prefer to eat meat than dairy if i am gonna stray from the vegan baseline, but that's tough to do in Greece. The haloumi actually worked well to add a bit of salt to the dish, which was needed because apparently Greek chefs do not season the food. The grilling was excellent. The zucchini and eggplant was still slightly crisp and chewy. I fucking hate meze where you get "grilled eggplant" and it's cold and limp and swimming in olive oil. Even 涼拌茄子 cold eggplant dish of Chinese cuisine leaves some tooth to it.
The next picture does not look very exciting, but it's an important one, because it shows what i think is perhaps the most essential working class food that there is in Greece. Aside from pizza, burgers and gyros (which is just the Greek term for döner), this is the other thing, and it's something that feels indigenous (although perhaps the Turks have it too). It's simply called a σάντουιτς (santoyits) - sandwich. Basically you get a large bun, more substantial than a hotdog bun but less stiff than a ciabatta, you pick whatever meat you want, lettuce/tomato/onion, various sauces and... french fries. They put the french fries in the bun. Next to the port in Thessaloniki, next to the port in Patras, this was the thing to order at the food carts and greasy spoons where all the truck drivers and dock workers went to eat. I ordered several in different places and it was always extremely satisfying. It is epic calorie overload junk food and it fucking rules.
The one that is pictured, although you can't see it, had sausage inside as the meat plus some tzatziki and hot sauce and it was the best one i had. Other popular meats were burger patties, πανσέτα (panseta) - bacon - and καλαμάκι (kalamaki) - grilled pork. Kalamaki is a confusing one because it's the same shish kebab thing that we call souvlaki overseas, and i think in Thessaloniki they also call it souvlaki, but in the Peloponnese souvlaki is the name for gyros/döner and kalamaki is souvlaki.
This might seem a bit silly to explain, but the point is that these are the kinds of food stands where nobody speaks English and in some cases there isn't even a menu, so you have to listen to what the other people are ordering and try to figure it out while you're in line and then order the same, or take a punt listing ingredients you frantically just looked up in your phone translator app so as not to be the dumb foreigner who blocked the line from moving.
At one place i ordered an "eco" (no meat) version, wondering what kind of thing they would put and... lordy. They put about a half inch of grated cheese in there then jammed it in the panini press for maximum meltelage. It was so, so heavy. But, also, kind of epic. Like... french fries and cheese and tomato in bread. Fucking. Calorize your face. Manly food.
Let's get back to salads. This was a salad from a sandwich bar that they called "Moroccan", although it's probably just a modern fusion cuisine thing. The weird things that look like mustard seeds are quinoa, which i don't think i ever ate before, but it's quite nice. Olives, oranges, onions, mint, almonds. A good vegan detox dish after all the heavy dairy and filo pastry the Greeks try to bury you in. Great textures, probably the best mouthfeel of anything i ate over there. Salt, acid, well balanced. Good stuff.
Alright folks, here's the highlight of my meals in Greece. Not because it was especially delicious, but because it was probably the most "authentic" food i got while i was there. Not from a blue collar food stand. Not from a hipster sandwich bar. Not from a late night student hangout. Not from a touristy taverna on the waterfront. This was back alley down homey local yokel aunties who cannot speak any English making whatever dishes they had ingredients for that day and writing it up on a chalkboard, wiping them off as they got sold out. Reminded me in both character of the restaurant and flavor of the food of eating in The South when i was traveling through the US.
This is μαυροματικα με σπανακι (mayromatika me spanaki) which means black eyed peas with spinach. Unlike most Greek restaurants which gave you a lemon, this one gave a lime, which just added to the whole The South/Caribbean feeling of the dish. Except much, much better bread than anything you get in the Americas. I mean... it was just beans and greens with little to no seasoning. But beans and greens is what i eat at home, so slap on the lime and shovel it on a hunk of chewy, crusty bread... Yeah, man, this was solid. I want some aunties like these to cook for me when i am sad because the food was like a hug.
The next picture is another interesting battle of menu translation. Generally when i was choosing places to eat, i chose places that had the Greek menu as their main menu, and only had an English translation on request (or not at all), because i figured the places whose default menu was English or bilingual would be more oriented to the tourist palate. Sometimes once the waiter realized i was a tourist, they'd take the Greek menu away but i always asked to keep it because otherwise you end up with useful descriptions like that bowl of white dip is "garlic". What? Yes, just "garlic". Of course that's not what it is. If you also have the Greek menu, then you will see it's actually σκορδαλιά (skordalia), which is a garlicky purée whose base is usually potato and olive oil. It's supposed to be served with fried fish, but this afternoon i just wasn't in the mood for more fatty stuff, so i figured getting garlic mashed potato (with ntakos on the side) would be a softer feed. And it was.
I should probably mention that the Greeks put french fries with everything, which contributed to my increasing aversion to heavy food. The french fries are always very good. Cut thick, fried to just the perfect amount of crispy, with a soft middle. Seasoned with some herbs as well as salt. They're truly experts at french fries. But beware ordering πατάτες (patates) - potatoes - anywhere as a side dish. They will not be roast or boiled or steamed. They will always be french fries. Even at expensive restaurants. It's bananas.
Case in point. This fucking restaurant. Worst meal in Greece, and also most expensive meal in Greece. I only sat down there because i was starving and couldn't find anywhere decent in Corinth. I asked what their specials were, because their menu was decidedly not vegan and rather expensive. This was one of the specials, αρακάς με πατάτες (arakas me patates) - peas with potatoes. I ordered it. I did not get it. I got fucking french fries instead, because the waiter heard πατάτες. Motherfuck. Like a stupid foreigner, i thought perhaps the french fries were just how the dish is served, and maybe the peas would come separately. So i ate the fries. The peas did not come separately.
When i asked what was going on, they said they'd misheard and had just given me potatoes. Fuck! Well now i had to get the peas with potatoes to save everyone's face. And... it fucking sucked. Tasted like something that came out of a can. So much of Greek food looks like this. Just fucking unappetizing, unseasoned slop that's been sitting in a buffet tray all day. It reminds me of school lunches when i went to school in the UK. And for anyone who has not eaten a school lunch in the UK, that is not a recommendation. Oh my God. This sucked so hard.
The other part of the meal was this thing, which is κολοκυθοκεφτέδες (kolokythokeftedes) or a zucchini croquette, a classic Greek dish. Which is also deep-fried. And the croquette has fucking cheese inside it, as well as being served with a sour cream dip. Like, how much fat do you want to shove in my face right now? I mean, not that i don't like a deep-fried snack every now and then. But when you get this, and then you get french fries, and then you finally get the original dish that you ordered in the first place and it's a heaping mountain of fresh vegetables stewed down to mush... God, and the serving sizes! Nowhere in Europe have they plopped down larger servings in front of me than Greece. You could've just given, like, two croquettes, you know? Would've been fine. I mean, at a classier restaurant too, you'd think they'd try to be more French about the whole thing.
Here is a different version of the Greek buffet experience. A lot of working class places have a small buffet for the daily specials and then some other stuff cook to order, but this joint was all buffet, which is a low-stress option when you are traveling because you see exactly what you're going to get. I finally saw some potatoes that weren't deep-fried, so i asked for those, got some salad (lettuce) and one thing i had been hunting for a week or two - γίγαντες (gigantes), which means "giants", so-called because of the size of the beans. It's essentially a baked bean type dish, so quite a cozy childhood flavor for me and something that's hard to find in Taiwan. I also got a local version of Fanta, which was nice enough. Good bread too, which along with the lime made this another surprisingly pleasant dish.
Oh, by the way, just serving lettuce by itself is less weird than you'd think. On a lot of those salad menus, along with the rustic "Greek" salad and the πολίτικη (politiki) "Constantinople" salad (which is basically coleslaw), you also get stuff like "cucumber and tomatoes", or just tomatoes on their own. Some places also have lettuce on its own, although if you only have the English menu it can be unclear whether they mean lettuce or greens. More on that in a bit. I do have a vague memory of this happening to me in Italy too at one point, where i just got lettuce and was confused, but i think you are supposed to season it yourself with the olive oil, salt and pepper on the table.
Let's talk greens. On the menu in many restaurants of Greece there is a thing called χόρτα (chorta), translated as greens, and never described in any greater depth. Every time i asked for it, they were "sold out". Finding χόρτα became a personal mission. I went out of my way to go to restaurants that had it on the menu, and time and time again i was disappointed. Finally i found a place with χόρτα. In fact, it had χόρτα, σταμναγκάθι (stamnagkathi), βλίτα (vlita), spinach and a couple of other enticing choices. When i asked the waiter he said they didn't have all of them.
Apparently, much like in China, if you order "greens" in Greece, you just get whatever greens happened to be at the market that morning. Sometimes you can order specific ones, but then they're only seasonally available and you might get a substitute green anyway. I have a suspicion that also much like China some restaurants don't even bother to stock them because greens are considered peasant food and nobody who has the money to go out to eat at a restaurant would want to be seen spending money on the same weeds that poor people are gathering from the riverbank outside.
Anyway, pictured here is stamnagkathi, which is a native green from Crete that according to Wikipedia is a type of chicory. It was excellent. Quite bitter, and it really needed a good squeeze of fresh lemon and some added table salt to give it better balance. But it had the sensation of eating 空心菜 water spinach. Like, stems that need a bit of chewing to get through, but then the chew pops the moisture inside for a nice mouthfeel. Of course it's Greece so there's no seasoning to pop aside from olive oil, but still. It felt good in the mouth.
Other things on the table are kalamata olives, super meaty and rich and much better than any of the trash olives you buy in jars around the rest of the world, and ταραμοσαλάτα (taramosalata), which is a classic food from my childhood. Whenever we used to visit my nan, she always had a tub of taramosalata in the fridge. It's another one of those dips that's made with mashed potato or breadcrumb purée for the base, plus olive oil, lemon and fish roe. It was the best treat ever. Nan would be upstairs drinking gin and tonic. I'd be downstairs making another sandwich with this magical salty spread that i didn't even know what it was. I always associated it with England generally and my nan specifically, because i never found it anywhere else till i was much older. I didn't realize it was Greek, but it is, and so i figured for one of my last meals in Greece i better order some. It was exactly as delicious as i remembered.
Back on greens... This restaurant which had multiple greens also messed up my order and didn't bring me the second damn plate of greens. It was one of those "now i found a place that has them, i better order two" moments, and the waiter was clearly befuddled that i had even bothered to ask for one. I guess tourists don't order greens, which is wild considering stuff like stamnagkathi you literally will not find anywhere else in the world. But eventually i got the second greens, which was the only other one they had in the kitchen - vlita. Vlita is actually the Greek name for purple amaranth, which - although it's native to the Mediterranean - is commonly available in markets in China and Taiwan and is often one of the greens you can choose to put in the pot when you're getting 滷味 or 麻辣燙. But it was still cool to get it cooked the Greek way. Which is boiled to within an inch of its life, like the spinach in a fucking British school lunch, but it is what it is. The cool thing about this amaranth is that it still had the flowers or the buds on it, so it was all curled up like a fern and had almost a brocolli-like sensation when my teeth went through it. So good.
Also pictured here is a zero alcohol beer. I always used to scoff at people who drank alcohol-free beer because what's the point? But Europe has a really big drinking culture, especially at dinner time, and when every table around you is drinking wine or beer or ouzo, it feels a bit strange to just drink water, like you're missing out on part of the experience. So i tried a few of these alcohol-free beers and they actually were pretty decent. Hit a similar spot to what ice tea does for me in Taiwan, a little bitter, a little sweet, cold and refreshing and not too many calories. Plus no hangover. Much better than a Fanta. I now officially don't think alcohol-free beer is stupid.
Just a quick mention for this dish, which is φάβα (fava). Fava is what Wikivoyage says you're going to be stuck eating all the time if you are vegan traveling in Greece, which might be true insofar as lots of restaurants have it on the menu. I ordered it once before this photo and it was more dal-like, but this time they puréed it.
This right here is my evidence for Not All Mediterranean Food Is Created Equal. Literally just across the Med in Egypt they also use fava beans to make ful medames, which although i have never visited Egypt, i have eaten plenty of times in restaurants around the world that i trust to be at least somewhat legit. And in all those places, the ful tasted so, so much better than any of these flop-ass fucking fava dishes in Greece. Because ful is seasoned. It has garlic and onions and herbs and spices and oil and it's just a delicious dish all round. But the Greeks are like, hey you know all that seasoning, let's not do that. Let's just put the beans in a pot and stew them till they have no flavor left... and now let's fucking blend the whole thing into a purée in case there was any hope there might still be some texture to delight the palate in there. It's like they go out of their way to do the blandest possible take on an ingredient. It wasn't bad - it was fresh legumes after all - it just wasn't... exciting, or interesting, or anything.
And i shall close with an ode to all of the filo pastry that i did not take any other photos of, but i did eat a few times because it's The Greek Thing To Do and available everywhere. (I even prepared a spanakopita with some colleagues as one of my work's teambuilding exercises. Did you know Greek filo uses olive oil instead of butter? It's vegan! Now you know.)
This was the sole restaurant i got given the English menu and did not make a fuss to get the Greek one because it was my last day and i was tired. The menu said feta with honey and sesame. Sounds nice. Go big or go home. My last piece of cheese before full ass dairy detox. Probably this dish has a name in Greek, and the name probably ends with "Pete", because it's a goddamn fucking pastry. It was obnoxiously huge. I would've been fine with a dish quarter the size. But not in Greece, everything has to be massive. And heavy. I mean. Cheese inside filo pastry, could you get any heavier? Maybe if they deep-fried it too. Hell, maybe they did. With honey on it. So much honey.
Conceptually this dish is great. The salt from the feta, the sweet from the honey, the flavor profile makes sense and it really does taste great on the first bite. And then you realize there's a hundred more bites, and this was just a side dish. So much cheese.
Yeah, after Greece, even mostly trying to pick the lighter options on the menu, i left feeling a similar kind of bloated to Panama. And a similar kind of disappointed, because although there are some great local ingredients and potential for turning them into memorable dishes, it's as if the culinary culture revolves around trying to remove flavor and texture rather than add it. It's tough to eat vegan if you are going to low end restaurants, and it's tough to find anything that highlights the local produce outside of the salad section of the menu. (I suppose i should have tried at least a bit of seafood, but i live on an island right next door to Japan, i can get world class seafood at home if i want it, which i don't.) The meze is fine, although heavier than the meze of Macedonia and Turkey, and less flavorful than the tapas of Spain.
But, all that said, nothing is awful. There wasn't anything i left on the plate, except for when the serving size was so huge i couldn't finish it. It's all perfectly... average. Which i suppose is exactly what a lot of people prefer to eat when they go on a beachfront holiday. Did the cuisine evolve this way for tourists, or did tourists gravitate to Greece because they appreciated getting consistently inoffensive food? Guess it's hard to know without talking to older people, and in particular older people who are interested in food the way i am, which i am starting to realize is not a lot of people.
I am fascinated by the history and sociology of food, how diet is shaped by the environment and the culture, and how it changes over the years. And, to be fair, i perhaps don't write enough about the globally indistinct food that is hugely popular in all the places i visit, because i personally don't find it particularly appealing. So don't get the wrong idea. The Greeks have local dishes and local ingredients they are very proud of, but their middle class still eats a lot of the exact same stuff as the middle class everywhere else in the world. Pizza. Burgers. Fried chicken. Spaghetti. Steak. Sandwiches. Potato chips. Donuts. Icecream. Travelers who like that stuff can rest assured they'll be able to eat just as they do at home.
So i make life difficult for myself by trying to avoid the same old stuff. But also the challenge to find something interesting is part of the adventure of travel, and has me exploring places i might not otherwise have visited, which in the end is often more rewarding than whatever i ate when i got there. No regrets. This trip was grand.
But let's take a last look at Greek cuisine, through a few of the meals i had in the Peloponnese and Attica. Be prepared, this is a long one. Keep a snack handy, because if you're anything like me, reading about food just makes you more hungry.
You might remember for my last supper in Thessaloniki i had tacos. Well, for my first bite in Patras, i also had tacos. Or, to be more specific ντάκος (ntakos), which is pronounced "dakos" (rhymes with tacos). This is a dish completely unrelated to Mexican tacos. It's apparently from Crete, and it is made from a barley rusk topped with olive oil, tomatoes, feta and oregano. It's similar to what i ate for breakfast every day in Andalucía in Spain, which was lightly toasted bread with olive oil, chopped tomatoes and salt. This sounds too simple to be worth bothering with, but if you have really good tomatoes, it's divine. Most countries i lived do not have really good tomatoes. But Spain does, and so does Italy, and Greece. This dish was the freshest and most pleasing thing i ate in Greece, and i went back to it a few times when i noticed it hiding at the bottom of the salads section of the menu.
A less fresh but still satisfying dish was this grilled vege platter i ordered at an ouzo/meze joint. Everything is grilled with - i think - a drizzle of honey on it for sweetness and better caramelization. The white thing on top is haloumi. As you can see, it's almost impossible to get vegan food in Greece. Forget the honey, most vege stuff comes with cheese on it, or yogurt, or some other thing forced out of an enslaved animal's boobs. I am a bit of an odd flexitarian in that i prefer to eat meat than dairy if i am gonna stray from the vegan baseline, but that's tough to do in Greece. The haloumi actually worked well to add a bit of salt to the dish, which was needed because apparently Greek chefs do not season the food. The grilling was excellent. The zucchini and eggplant was still slightly crisp and chewy. I fucking hate meze where you get "grilled eggplant" and it's cold and limp and swimming in olive oil. Even 涼拌茄子 cold eggplant dish of Chinese cuisine leaves some tooth to it.
The next picture does not look very exciting, but it's an important one, because it shows what i think is perhaps the most essential working class food that there is in Greece. Aside from pizza, burgers and gyros (which is just the Greek term for döner), this is the other thing, and it's something that feels indigenous (although perhaps the Turks have it too). It's simply called a σάντουιτς (santoyits) - sandwich. Basically you get a large bun, more substantial than a hotdog bun but less stiff than a ciabatta, you pick whatever meat you want, lettuce/tomato/onion, various sauces and... french fries. They put the french fries in the bun. Next to the port in Thessaloniki, next to the port in Patras, this was the thing to order at the food carts and greasy spoons where all the truck drivers and dock workers went to eat. I ordered several in different places and it was always extremely satisfying. It is epic calorie overload junk food and it fucking rules.
The one that is pictured, although you can't see it, had sausage inside as the meat plus some tzatziki and hot sauce and it was the best one i had. Other popular meats were burger patties, πανσέτα (panseta) - bacon - and καλαμάκι (kalamaki) - grilled pork. Kalamaki is a confusing one because it's the same shish kebab thing that we call souvlaki overseas, and i think in Thessaloniki they also call it souvlaki, but in the Peloponnese souvlaki is the name for gyros/döner and kalamaki is souvlaki.
This might seem a bit silly to explain, but the point is that these are the kinds of food stands where nobody speaks English and in some cases there isn't even a menu, so you have to listen to what the other people are ordering and try to figure it out while you're in line and then order the same, or take a punt listing ingredients you frantically just looked up in your phone translator app so as not to be the dumb foreigner who blocked the line from moving.
At one place i ordered an "eco" (no meat) version, wondering what kind of thing they would put and... lordy. They put about a half inch of grated cheese in there then jammed it in the panini press for maximum meltelage. It was so, so heavy. But, also, kind of epic. Like... french fries and cheese and tomato in bread. Fucking. Calorize your face. Manly food.
Let's get back to salads. This was a salad from a sandwich bar that they called "Moroccan", although it's probably just a modern fusion cuisine thing. The weird things that look like mustard seeds are quinoa, which i don't think i ever ate before, but it's quite nice. Olives, oranges, onions, mint, almonds. A good vegan detox dish after all the heavy dairy and filo pastry the Greeks try to bury you in. Great textures, probably the best mouthfeel of anything i ate over there. Salt, acid, well balanced. Good stuff.
Alright folks, here's the highlight of my meals in Greece. Not because it was especially delicious, but because it was probably the most "authentic" food i got while i was there. Not from a blue collar food stand. Not from a hipster sandwich bar. Not from a late night student hangout. Not from a touristy taverna on the waterfront. This was back alley down homey local yokel aunties who cannot speak any English making whatever dishes they had ingredients for that day and writing it up on a chalkboard, wiping them off as they got sold out. Reminded me in both character of the restaurant and flavor of the food of eating in The South when i was traveling through the US.
This is μαυροματικα με σπανακι (mayromatika me spanaki) which means black eyed peas with spinach. Unlike most Greek restaurants which gave you a lemon, this one gave a lime, which just added to the whole The South/Caribbean feeling of the dish. Except much, much better bread than anything you get in the Americas. I mean... it was just beans and greens with little to no seasoning. But beans and greens is what i eat at home, so slap on the lime and shovel it on a hunk of chewy, crusty bread... Yeah, man, this was solid. I want some aunties like these to cook for me when i am sad because the food was like a hug.
The next picture is another interesting battle of menu translation. Generally when i was choosing places to eat, i chose places that had the Greek menu as their main menu, and only had an English translation on request (or not at all), because i figured the places whose default menu was English or bilingual would be more oriented to the tourist palate. Sometimes once the waiter realized i was a tourist, they'd take the Greek menu away but i always asked to keep it because otherwise you end up with useful descriptions like that bowl of white dip is "garlic". What? Yes, just "garlic". Of course that's not what it is. If you also have the Greek menu, then you will see it's actually σκορδαλιά (skordalia), which is a garlicky purée whose base is usually potato and olive oil. It's supposed to be served with fried fish, but this afternoon i just wasn't in the mood for more fatty stuff, so i figured getting garlic mashed potato (with ntakos on the side) would be a softer feed. And it was.
I should probably mention that the Greeks put french fries with everything, which contributed to my increasing aversion to heavy food. The french fries are always very good. Cut thick, fried to just the perfect amount of crispy, with a soft middle. Seasoned with some herbs as well as salt. They're truly experts at french fries. But beware ordering πατάτες (patates) - potatoes - anywhere as a side dish. They will not be roast or boiled or steamed. They will always be french fries. Even at expensive restaurants. It's bananas.
Case in point. This fucking restaurant. Worst meal in Greece, and also most expensive meal in Greece. I only sat down there because i was starving and couldn't find anywhere decent in Corinth. I asked what their specials were, because their menu was decidedly not vegan and rather expensive. This was one of the specials, αρακάς με πατάτες (arakas me patates) - peas with potatoes. I ordered it. I did not get it. I got fucking french fries instead, because the waiter heard πατάτες. Motherfuck. Like a stupid foreigner, i thought perhaps the french fries were just how the dish is served, and maybe the peas would come separately. So i ate the fries. The peas did not come separately.
When i asked what was going on, they said they'd misheard and had just given me potatoes. Fuck! Well now i had to get the peas with potatoes to save everyone's face. And... it fucking sucked. Tasted like something that came out of a can. So much of Greek food looks like this. Just fucking unappetizing, unseasoned slop that's been sitting in a buffet tray all day. It reminds me of school lunches when i went to school in the UK. And for anyone who has not eaten a school lunch in the UK, that is not a recommendation. Oh my God. This sucked so hard.
The other part of the meal was this thing, which is κολοκυθοκεφτέδες (kolokythokeftedes) or a zucchini croquette, a classic Greek dish. Which is also deep-fried. And the croquette has fucking cheese inside it, as well as being served with a sour cream dip. Like, how much fat do you want to shove in my face right now? I mean, not that i don't like a deep-fried snack every now and then. But when you get this, and then you get french fries, and then you finally get the original dish that you ordered in the first place and it's a heaping mountain of fresh vegetables stewed down to mush... God, and the serving sizes! Nowhere in Europe have they plopped down larger servings in front of me than Greece. You could've just given, like, two croquettes, you know? Would've been fine. I mean, at a classier restaurant too, you'd think they'd try to be more French about the whole thing.
Here is a different version of the Greek buffet experience. A lot of working class places have a small buffet for the daily specials and then some other stuff cook to order, but this joint was all buffet, which is a low-stress option when you are traveling because you see exactly what you're going to get. I finally saw some potatoes that weren't deep-fried, so i asked for those, got some salad (lettuce) and one thing i had been hunting for a week or two - γίγαντες (gigantes), which means "giants", so-called because of the size of the beans. It's essentially a baked bean type dish, so quite a cozy childhood flavor for me and something that's hard to find in Taiwan. I also got a local version of Fanta, which was nice enough. Good bread too, which along with the lime made this another surprisingly pleasant dish.
Oh, by the way, just serving lettuce by itself is less weird than you'd think. On a lot of those salad menus, along with the rustic "Greek" salad and the πολίτικη (politiki) "Constantinople" salad (which is basically coleslaw), you also get stuff like "cucumber and tomatoes", or just tomatoes on their own. Some places also have lettuce on its own, although if you only have the English menu it can be unclear whether they mean lettuce or greens. More on that in a bit. I do have a vague memory of this happening to me in Italy too at one point, where i just got lettuce and was confused, but i think you are supposed to season it yourself with the olive oil, salt and pepper on the table.
Let's talk greens. On the menu in many restaurants of Greece there is a thing called χόρτα (chorta), translated as greens, and never described in any greater depth. Every time i asked for it, they were "sold out". Finding χόρτα became a personal mission. I went out of my way to go to restaurants that had it on the menu, and time and time again i was disappointed. Finally i found a place with χόρτα. In fact, it had χόρτα, σταμναγκάθι (stamnagkathi), βλίτα (vlita), spinach and a couple of other enticing choices. When i asked the waiter he said they didn't have all of them.
Apparently, much like in China, if you order "greens" in Greece, you just get whatever greens happened to be at the market that morning. Sometimes you can order specific ones, but then they're only seasonally available and you might get a substitute green anyway. I have a suspicion that also much like China some restaurants don't even bother to stock them because greens are considered peasant food and nobody who has the money to go out to eat at a restaurant would want to be seen spending money on the same weeds that poor people are gathering from the riverbank outside.
Anyway, pictured here is stamnagkathi, which is a native green from Crete that according to Wikipedia is a type of chicory. It was excellent. Quite bitter, and it really needed a good squeeze of fresh lemon and some added table salt to give it better balance. But it had the sensation of eating 空心菜 water spinach. Like, stems that need a bit of chewing to get through, but then the chew pops the moisture inside for a nice mouthfeel. Of course it's Greece so there's no seasoning to pop aside from olive oil, but still. It felt good in the mouth.
Other things on the table are kalamata olives, super meaty and rich and much better than any of the trash olives you buy in jars around the rest of the world, and ταραμοσαλάτα (taramosalata), which is a classic food from my childhood. Whenever we used to visit my nan, she always had a tub of taramosalata in the fridge. It's another one of those dips that's made with mashed potato or breadcrumb purée for the base, plus olive oil, lemon and fish roe. It was the best treat ever. Nan would be upstairs drinking gin and tonic. I'd be downstairs making another sandwich with this magical salty spread that i didn't even know what it was. I always associated it with England generally and my nan specifically, because i never found it anywhere else till i was much older. I didn't realize it was Greek, but it is, and so i figured for one of my last meals in Greece i better order some. It was exactly as delicious as i remembered.
Back on greens... This restaurant which had multiple greens also messed up my order and didn't bring me the second damn plate of greens. It was one of those "now i found a place that has them, i better order two" moments, and the waiter was clearly befuddled that i had even bothered to ask for one. I guess tourists don't order greens, which is wild considering stuff like stamnagkathi you literally will not find anywhere else in the world. But eventually i got the second greens, which was the only other one they had in the kitchen - vlita. Vlita is actually the Greek name for purple amaranth, which - although it's native to the Mediterranean - is commonly available in markets in China and Taiwan and is often one of the greens you can choose to put in the pot when you're getting 滷味 or 麻辣燙. But it was still cool to get it cooked the Greek way. Which is boiled to within an inch of its life, like the spinach in a fucking British school lunch, but it is what it is. The cool thing about this amaranth is that it still had the flowers or the buds on it, so it was all curled up like a fern and had almost a brocolli-like sensation when my teeth went through it. So good.
Also pictured here is a zero alcohol beer. I always used to scoff at people who drank alcohol-free beer because what's the point? But Europe has a really big drinking culture, especially at dinner time, and when every table around you is drinking wine or beer or ouzo, it feels a bit strange to just drink water, like you're missing out on part of the experience. So i tried a few of these alcohol-free beers and they actually were pretty decent. Hit a similar spot to what ice tea does for me in Taiwan, a little bitter, a little sweet, cold and refreshing and not too many calories. Plus no hangover. Much better than a Fanta. I now officially don't think alcohol-free beer is stupid.
Just a quick mention for this dish, which is φάβα (fava). Fava is what Wikivoyage says you're going to be stuck eating all the time if you are vegan traveling in Greece, which might be true insofar as lots of restaurants have it on the menu. I ordered it once before this photo and it was more dal-like, but this time they puréed it.
This right here is my evidence for Not All Mediterranean Food Is Created Equal. Literally just across the Med in Egypt they also use fava beans to make ful medames, which although i have never visited Egypt, i have eaten plenty of times in restaurants around the world that i trust to be at least somewhat legit. And in all those places, the ful tasted so, so much better than any of these flop-ass fucking fava dishes in Greece. Because ful is seasoned. It has garlic and onions and herbs and spices and oil and it's just a delicious dish all round. But the Greeks are like, hey you know all that seasoning, let's not do that. Let's just put the beans in a pot and stew them till they have no flavor left... and now let's fucking blend the whole thing into a purée in case there was any hope there might still be some texture to delight the palate in there. It's like they go out of their way to do the blandest possible take on an ingredient. It wasn't bad - it was fresh legumes after all - it just wasn't... exciting, or interesting, or anything.
And i shall close with an ode to all of the filo pastry that i did not take any other photos of, but i did eat a few times because it's The Greek Thing To Do and available everywhere. (I even prepared a spanakopita with some colleagues as one of my work's teambuilding exercises. Did you know Greek filo uses olive oil instead of butter? It's vegan! Now you know.)
This was the sole restaurant i got given the English menu and did not make a fuss to get the Greek one because it was my last day and i was tired. The menu said feta with honey and sesame. Sounds nice. Go big or go home. My last piece of cheese before full ass dairy detox. Probably this dish has a name in Greek, and the name probably ends with "Pete", because it's a goddamn fucking pastry. It was obnoxiously huge. I would've been fine with a dish quarter the size. But not in Greece, everything has to be massive. And heavy. I mean. Cheese inside filo pastry, could you get any heavier? Maybe if they deep-fried it too. Hell, maybe they did. With honey on it. So much honey.
Conceptually this dish is great. The salt from the feta, the sweet from the honey, the flavor profile makes sense and it really does taste great on the first bite. And then you realize there's a hundred more bites, and this was just a side dish. So much cheese.
Yeah, after Greece, even mostly trying to pick the lighter options on the menu, i left feeling a similar kind of bloated to Panama. And a similar kind of disappointed, because although there are some great local ingredients and potential for turning them into memorable dishes, it's as if the culinary culture revolves around trying to remove flavor and texture rather than add it. It's tough to eat vegan if you are going to low end restaurants, and it's tough to find anything that highlights the local produce outside of the salad section of the menu. (I suppose i should have tried at least a bit of seafood, but i live on an island right next door to Japan, i can get world class seafood at home if i want it, which i don't.) The meze is fine, although heavier than the meze of Macedonia and Turkey, and less flavorful than the tapas of Spain.
But, all that said, nothing is awful. There wasn't anything i left on the plate, except for when the serving size was so huge i couldn't finish it. It's all perfectly... average. Which i suppose is exactly what a lot of people prefer to eat when they go on a beachfront holiday. Did the cuisine evolve this way for tourists, or did tourists gravitate to Greece because they appreciated getting consistently inoffensive food? Guess it's hard to know without talking to older people, and in particular older people who are interested in food the way i am, which i am starting to realize is not a lot of people.
I am fascinated by the history and sociology of food, how diet is shaped by the environment and the culture, and how it changes over the years. And, to be fair, i perhaps don't write enough about the globally indistinct food that is hugely popular in all the places i visit, because i personally don't find it particularly appealing. So don't get the wrong idea. The Greeks have local dishes and local ingredients they are very proud of, but their middle class still eats a lot of the exact same stuff as the middle class everywhere else in the world. Pizza. Burgers. Fried chicken. Spaghetti. Steak. Sandwiches. Potato chips. Donuts. Icecream. Travelers who like that stuff can rest assured they'll be able to eat just as they do at home.
So i make life difficult for myself by trying to avoid the same old stuff. But also the challenge to find something interesting is part of the adventure of travel, and has me exploring places i might not otherwise have visited, which in the end is often more rewarding than whatever i ate when i got there. No regrets. This trip was grand.