Greetings ! I live much of the year on luxury cruise ships as an enrichment lecturer, exploring the intersection of history, culture, and cuisine. I write about these in my weekly Destination Curation, 8-Hour Guides to Cruise Ports, and Books for Travelers reviews. I'll help you make your travel full of meaning and context! Join me!
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🇬🇷 Savor the Ancient and Modern Flavors of Greece 🇬🇷
I hope your August has begun advantageously! We have enjoyed several days of beautiful sailing in the Ionian Sea. I wish I could say that we’ve been actively sightseeing, but the truth is that both Dmitry and I have been hard at work on our laptops onboard Quest.
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I’m working on new talks on Ibiza, the Magna Graecia, Fortress Malta, and others, while Dmitry is focused on the Three Seas Initiative and keeping an eye on Ukraine, where I’m happy to say, the tide seems to be turning. We’ve only taken small breaks to grab a towel and head ashore for a quick and very refreshing swim or a memorable meal between work sessions this week.
I’m determined that will change this week, as we have some exciting ports of call in the Adriatic to look forward to this coming week! More on that below!
As a subscriber to the Destination Curation Newsletter, you have access to my cruise schedule, which you can visit here. If any of these voyages align with your travel plans, I'd love to share the journey with you.
A spectacular dinner in Santorini we enjoyed earlier this week is still very much on my mind. Set aside the rooftop restaurant with fabulous sunset views and let’s focus on the food. It was nothing elaborate: just a few of the classics, including Santorini’s incomparable fava spread made from signature beans that take their unique flavor from the island’s volcanic soil. Also, Santorini’s signature tomato fritters --tomatokeftedes -- I can never get enough of!
This meal is the whole argument I want to make to you this week: I’ve been both lecturing on the history of Greek cuisine, and continuing my delicious exploration of it on shore.
The world believes it knows Greek food, and the world is almost entirely wrong. We picture flaming saganaki and a shouted "Opa!", both of which were invented in Chicago in 1968. We picture gyros (pronounced “yee-rohs”) as ancient (though I lived on them as a student at Columbia), but these arrived in Athens only in the 1920s, carried by refugees expelled from Turkey. What actually sits on a Greek table is something far older, far stranger, and far more delicious than the tourist version lets on: a cuisine as old as Western civilization itself, and remarkably little changed from what it has always been.
Saganaki cheese not on fire, but with figs and honey
Consider fasolada, the white bean soup that Greeks still eat on cold evenings. Strip out the tomatoes, which did not reach Greece until after 1492, and you are eating essentially what a citizen of Classical Athens ate for dinner two and a half thousand years ago. The soup carried Greeks through famines, wars, and the whole catastrophic twentieth century, and it has not changed, because it got the recipe right the first time. This is the thing that fascinates me most as I sail these coasts and eat my way from port to port: in Greece, history is not in the museum. It is on the plate, and it is still warm.
Fasolada: Greek bean soup
The reason for all this continuity is geography. Eighty percent of Greece is too steep or rocky for grain, which is precisely why the diet built itself instead on the three crops that thrive where wheat fails: the olive, the grape, and barley. Athena won the city of Athens by offering the olive rather than Poseidon's saltwater spring, and Solon made cutting a cultivated olive tree a capital offense around 590 BCE. Olive oil was food, fuel, medicine, and light. It still does most of the work in a Greek kitchen. A plate of ladera, green beans braised slowly with tomato, carries a startling amount of oil, and that is not an error. That is the point.
If there is one flavor I want you to taste differently after this letter, it is that oil. The Athenians, remember, chose Athena's olive over Poseidon's saltwater spring, and then built a civilization on the decision. In a Greek kitchen the oil is never merely a cooking fat. It is the medium, the finish, and very often the loudest flavor on the plate. It is also, in the end, a fruit juice, which is exactly why it tastes so alive near the source, sometimes pressed within sight of the grove rather than blended and shipped across an ocean. Learn just two names and you will shop like an insider. Koroneiki is the peppery, intensely green workhorse of Crete and the Peloponnese, the oil you want when the oil is meant to be part of the dish, poured over tomatoes and feta or finishing a plate of grilled fish. Manaki is its gentler cousin, rounder and softer, made for the bread-and-oil moment and milder salads.
Look for the letters PDO or PGI on the label, which certify that provenance genuinely mattered to the producer, favor a recent harvest date and a dark bottle or tin, and know that a 500-milliliter bottle is the traveler's sweet spot. That peppery catch at the back of your throat is not a flaw to apologize for but a sign of freshness and of the phenolic compounds that make a great oil worth celebrating. I lay out the whole traveler's guide, which names to know, which regions to trust, and how to carry a bottle home tasting the way it did in the shop, in Koroneiki, Manaki & More: A Cruise Traveler's Guide to Greek Olive Oil. Fair warning: once you taste the real thing, the supermarket bottle will never satisfy you again.
What layered on top of this ancient foundation is one of the great stories in food. Twelve hundred years of Byzantine rule brought the Orthodox fasting calendar, which forbids meat, dairy, and even olive oil on roughly 180 days a year. Faced with that constraint, Greek cooks produced one of the world's most sophisticated vegetable and legume cuisines, developed almost entirely under religious rules. The monks of Mount Athos have kept the austere version alive for a thousand years. Then came the Ottomans, who did not erase Greek food, but greatly enriched it. Peppers, tomatoes, and coffee all arrived during or after this period. Eggplant arrived much earlier, via the Arabs in to Southern Spain. The cinnamon you taste in a Corfiot meat stew was once, quite literally, worth more than the lamb. A living cuisine absorbs its conquerors and calls their ingredients its own.
Even moussaka, the dish everyone assumes is ancient, tells this story. In its current form it was essentially invented by one man, Nikolaos Tselementes, in 1920s Athens, under the spell of French cooking. The eggplant is Arab, the béchamelis French, the spiced lamb is Ottoman. And the dish is Greek in the deepest possible sense: made of borrowed things, assembled with total confidence, and claimed without apology.
The single most important event in modern Greek cooking is one most travelers have never heard of. The expulsion of 1.5 million Greeks from Asia Minor in 1922 brought the refined, spice-laden urban cooking of Smyrna and Constantinople to the mainland. That cinnamon-and-allspice signature, those stuffed mussels, that whole sophisticated register: much of what we now think of as the height of Greek cuisine is the food of people who lost their homes and rebuilt them somewhere else. You cannot eat honestly in Athens without tasting that history.
And then there is what is happening right now, which is why I keep telling my guests that Athens has quietly become one of Europe's more exciting food cities. A generation of chefs trained in France, Spain, and New York have come home to ask a genuinely hard question: what does Greek cuisine taste like when someone takes it completely seriously? The answers involve foraged mountain greens, revived heritage grains, and a wine renaissance that has stunned the sommeliers. For most of the last century the world knew Greek wine only as retsina. Today, Assyrtiko, grown in Santorini's volcanic pumice on basket-trained vines up to eight hundred years old, produces a bone-dry white of such mineral, saline intensity that it ages like a great Burgundy. Greece has more than three hundred indigenous grape varieties, more than almost any country on earth. We have barely begun to discover them.
I have written about all of this at much greater length on the site, and if this week's letter has whetted your appetite, I encourage you to dig in. My full deep dive, Greek Cuisine: 5,000 Years on a Plate, traces the whole arc from Minoan palace storerooms to the modern ouzeri, with the dishes to seek out in each region. And because no Greek meal is complete without something in the glass, my companion piece on The Drinks of Greece: Ouzo, Tsipouro, and Retsina will teach you to order like a local and, more importantly, to sip rather han shoot, which is the single surest way to be mistaken for someone who belongs.
If you take one practical thing from me this week, let it be this. Do not rush a Greek meal. The whole mezze tradition is fundamentally incompatible with "we have to be back on the ship by five." In a proper ouzeri you order the ouzo, and then olives arrive, and then taramosalata (which should be beige not pink*)*, and then grilled octopus, and it can happily go on for hours. Sit down, order the small plates, and let Greece happen at its own ancient pace. The meal ends not when the plates are cleared but when everyone has said what they came to say.
Three Book Recommendations
Greece: The Cookbook by Vefa Alexiadou. This is the Phaidon doorstop, and it is the closest thing Greece has to a national culinary bible. Alexiadou is the Julia Child of Greece, and her 660-odd recipes are the authoritative record of how Greeks actually cook at home, region by region. It is not a book you read in bed so much as one you consult for a lifetime. I have made my methodical way through it over the years, trying many of these reliable and delicious recipes.
My Greek Table by Diane Kochilas. Kochilas is the great living authority on regional Greek food, and this is her most beautiful book: village cooking, wild greens, and the sort of dishes you will never find in a tourist taverna. Read it before you sail and you will know what to ask for ashore.
The Foods of the Greek Islands by Aglaia Kremezi. Perfect for the island-hopper. Kremezi lives on Kea and writes about the distinct, sometimes austere cooking of the islands with real scholarship and real appetite. Her chapter on the volcanic cuisine of Santorini will change how you eat there.
Looking for the next great read? Head over to my Books for Travelers sections, where you can now browse by region for book reviews and reading lists that will direct you to the perfect book to read before your next trip: be it on land, sea, or in your armchair.
For more choices, visit my voluminous regional reading lists.
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We sail onward! As I mentioned above, I’m excited for this week’s ports, which include Split, Kotor, Corfu, Vis, and a welcome return to Zadar, where I am determined to get to the Archeological Museum AND have time to jump in the ocean from the Sea Organ’s steps. We will end up back here in beautiful Dubrovnik.
Zadar's Sea Organ: the steps create music and you can dive right into the Adriatic!
I love hearing from you -- let me know how I can help make your travel meaningful. I am rolling out new 8-Hour Guides to popular cruise destinations and love getting suggestions for new ones from this amazing community of readers.
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Destination Curation Newsletter: Make Travel Meaningful
Greetings ! I live much of the year on luxury cruise ships as an enrichment lecturer, exploring the intersection of history, culture, and cuisine. I write about these in my weekly Destination Curation, 8-Hour Guides to Cruise Ports, and Books for Travelers reviews. I'll help you make your travel full of meaning and context! Join me!
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