Recipes from Greece

Our first holiday in Greece was taken from a capital city where good fish was scarce. So we determined to have a fish dinner on the night of our arrival in Athens. We chose to go to Turkolímeno, the yachting and fishing village near the Piraeus, and were at once filled with pleasure at the sight of the long row of fish restaurants each with its tables along the quayside and twinkling lights overhead. Here, after making the difficult choice between the restaurants, we met the Greek custom of going to the refrigerator and choosing the fish we would eat. For some reason there were hardly any other customers that evening, perhaps because it was late in the year and rather cool for eating out of doors. The restaurants abut on each other without division along the quayside, and we had the impression of being alone at a series of about a thousand tables, with five hundred yachts drawn up alongside and a hundred waiters stretching into the distance – ranging from the life-sized one whose shadow fell over our table to the little black and white blob in the furthest restaurant of all. Da Chirico should have been there to translate the strange perspectives on to canvas.