Greek Food

Now to expand my favourite subject, food. Every second night we travelled into one village or another to eat at a variety of tavernas.

When you sit down they spread a paper or plastic tablecloth down and as you eat, chicken bones, olive pips, fish bones what ever, are thrown onto the tabletop. It looks incredibly messy by the end but it is great fun to eat like a barbarian and for it to be publicly acceptable. The food is so tasty and so inexpensive in the country areas with the exception of fish, this is really expensive but more on that later.

Most main courses are sold by weight, so we could sit down order 2 baskets of bread, 2 large Greek salads with big slabs of feta on top and swimming in rich fresh olive oil, 1 kilo of spit roasted pork, 1 kilo of roasted chicken pieces, a large bowl of baked potatoes basted in lemon and oregano, 3 or 4 500ml jugs of the local vino and coffee afterwards for 23 euros total. For four of us it worked out at about AUD$12 each. Only when we decided to try a fish restaurant one night did the bill really hurt as most snapper and better eating fish are around 40 euros per kilo (AUD$70). Almost 25% more than the cost of prime beef in Germany, which is triple the cost of Australian beef. Our six baby snapper with Greek salad and wine cost closer to 60 euros or AUD$30 per person. Almost triple the cost of the other meals but wow, those baby snapper, char grilled were as succulent and tasty as any fish I have ever eaten.

The trouble is that they have fished the Mediterranean almost to the point of extinction. Fresh fish are shipped in by trucks from Norway to Greece (3000km’s) in specially built water tanks to keep them alive on the journey. The lack of larger fish in the sea meant that the sardines could truly thrive. The Japanese picked up on the huge shoals of sardines by satellite and sent in a fishing fleet of ultra large ships and working the international waters through the entire centre of the Mediterranean, they managed to almost wipe out the sardine population in 3½ years. Unbelievable but true.

On a separate night we went to the village of Scala where the town has series of canals flowing through it. Locally it is known as Little Venice but the only gondolas are big fat local geese. Every Saturday night one of the restaurants puts on a couple of spit-roasted sheep marinated in garlic and herbs. We ordered two kilos of meat to go with the dips and salad. Boy was it good. Soooo tasty I just know I am going to have to return one day. It is one of the true delights of Greece to get out of the cities and to eat in the villages with the locals. So relaxed, so easygoing and ever so tasty. The wine is always a bit of surprise because the Greeks insist that this year’s wine is the best. They don’t like to cellar wine so you always get a Riesling style white or a rosé style red in the tavernas and very young ones at that. Retsina is considered a tourist drink and none of the locals will drink it. The joys of being a tourist hey :)