Zorba's Taverna: The Trouble With Goats and Mayors, page 18
By midnight, the place looked like it had survived a small but meaningful earthquake – overturned chairs, broken glasses, a tablecloth still smouldering – and yet the tourists cheered.
Zorba didn’t just cook, he conducted.
Every slam of the pan was a commandment. Every slice of the knife, a sermon.
He barked orders at Theodora, who barked back louder, and together they created food that felt less like a meal and more like a dare.
Claude whispered, “It’s not cooking, it’s theatre.”
Dimitri shook his head. “It’s not theatre. It’s justice.”
People cried over their lentils. Even Spiros gave a single nod, which in village terms was a standing ovation.
The next day, the internet had done its work.
A fresh headline appeared: “Forget Michelin: Telios Has Zorba”.
We sat in silence, shell-shocked. Claude put his head down on the table. Mary groaned into her coffee.
Zorba poured himself a glass of wine, sat under the olive tree, and lit another cigarette.
“You cannot stop them,” he said finally. “But you can outlast them.”
He raised his glass towards the taverna, smoky, loud, still vibrating from the night before, and nodded, as though approving of the chaos.
Theodora rolled her eyes, but her mouth twitched like she was trying not to smile.
Mary muttered, “God help us.”
And Katerina, smug as ever, climbed onto a chair and stole Zorba’s bread.
That evening, Zorba stayed long after the others had drifted away, smoke curling around him in thin grey ribbons, like punctuation marks in a story only he could read.
I sat with him for a while, not speaking, letting the night do the talking. The taverna was winding down around us – the last plates drying in the rack, the chairs stacked in quiet, lopsided towers, Katerina crunching something in the shadows that I was fairly sure wasn’t food, but which I decided was not my problem.
The air was thick with the smell of charcoal and vinegar, and something in me ached – the kind of ache you get when you realise you are standing in the middle of something rare, and fragile, and alive.
It struck me then: this is what people came for. Not the service, which was inconsistent at best and occasionally hostile. Not even the food, good as it was – some nights it was better than others. No, they came for this.
The hum. The clatter. The sense that here, at least, nothing was pretending to be something else.
In a world of polished surfaces and curated experiences, this place was unapologetically itself. A little crooked, a little smoky, a little too loud, but real. And maybe that was why the world had found us. People were thirsty, not just for wine, but for something honest. And the cruel trick was that our very effort to stay honest, to stay a little rough, a little wild, might one day be the thing that broke us.
We couldn’t stop the world coming in. But we could try, at least, to hold the line.
When Zorba finally stood and stubbed out his cigarette, it wasn’t just a gesture. It was a full stop. A promise.
He was reminding us what it was for.
Not to impress.
Not to trend.
But to feed – simply, fiercely, honestly.
And that, we could never let go.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Goat Who Needed a Hug
Katerina was not herself. Not a single headbutt had been administered all day. No flip-flops had been chewed, no menus sampled, not even a casual nibble at a passing napkin. Instead, she drifted through the taverna like a tragic heroine from a village soap opera, doing the goat equivalent of sighing, and staring into the middle distance, as though contemplating the futility of existence, or at least the sudden lack of chaos.
“She’s depressed,” Maria whispered, handing her a piece of melon with solemn ceremony. “You can see it in her shoulders.”
We all had theories.
Perhaps she sensed the rising tension, the politics, the paperwork, the romantic weather systems moving in from America which threatened to rain on Mary. Perhaps she felt threatened by Spiros’s change of mood. His suspicion that there were more things going on that he hadn’t been told about. He carried a new energy of reluctance she couldn’t quite place.
Or maybe, and this became the leading theory, she was broody.
Her adopted kittens had moved on. They’d stopped snuggling. They no longer followed her through the lemon grove or used her as a warm pillow. They were independent now. Teenagers. The kind who ignore you all day and then show up at lunchtime pretending to care, only to steal your food and vanish again.
“She wants company,” Theodora declared, eyeing Katerina. She had matchmaking on the mind. “Not cats. Her kind. A proper boy goat.”
“A broody goat?” Claude said. “We need a suitor?”
“Preferably one with strong haunches and emotional intelligence,” added Maria, who had recently taken up goat astrology. “Taurus, ideally. Earth signs pair well with stubbornness.”
Alex crossed her arms. “No.”
That was it. One syllable, flat and immovable, like a boulder dropped in front of a bad idea.
“No?”
“The last thing we need around here is another goat,” she said. “We are not a farm. We are not a sanctuary. We are definitely not a petting zoo.”
“But she’s lonely,” Theodora insisted.
“She’s judging us more than usual,” said Dimitri.
“She’s sulking in the lemon grove,” added Mary. “She ignored an entire bucket of chips.”
Alex remained unmoved. “Katerina is not sad. She’s thoughtful. It’s different. And if we bring in another goat, what’s next? A donkey with commitment issues? A sheep commune? No. Absolutely not.”
But it was too late.
Because, as Theodora pointed out with the serene menace of someone who has won many arguments with pie, “Democracy was invented in Greece.”
And in Telios, that democracy now included a surprisingly well-organised goat-lobbying group, consisting of three pensioners, two bored teenagers, and a tourist who thought the entire discussion was a form of entertainment.
So Alex was overruled.
The vote was held behind the taverna, using a show of hands, a horn of approval from Katerina herself, and a ballot box previously used to collect bread orders.
The result?
Unanimous.
Well, except Alex, who wrote “No more goats” on a napkin and stapled it to the lemon tree.
But the village had spoken.
And soon, Telios’s most eligible bachelor goat was en route, whether Alex liked it or not.
He arrived in the back of a pickup at dusk, blinking through the dust like a mythical creature reluctantly returning to the mortal realm. His name was Vassilis. He had soulful eyes, uneven horns, and the demeanour of someone who’d once been left behind on a ferry.
He looked at Katerina.
Katerina looked at him.
Something passed between them. Recognition? Interest? Mutual goat confusion?
She took a few steps forwards.
He bleated, a soft, hopeful bleat.
She huffed, turned away, then, as if rethinking things, turned and gave him a single, dignified headbutt.
We assumed this was love.
And for a few days, it was. They shared wall space behind the bins. He tried to follow her around the taverna. She tolerated it. He attempted to impress her by climbing things, headbutting things, and once, unsuccessfully, eating an ashtray.
She ignored most of it.
By day four, the cracks appeared.
He bleated too much. He chewed too loudly. He stood too close to her spot under the fig tree.
By day five, she had moved three metres to the left and begun glaring at him like he’d served her overcooked aubergine. He attempted to woo her with a sprig of basil. She responded by climbing onto a roof and refusing to come down.
“He’s trying,” said Dimitri.
“She’s finished,” said Alex.
And just like that, it ended.
Not with drama. Not with tragedy.
But simply with boredom.
He was sweet. He was sincere. But she was Katerina. And Katerina, as it turns out, prefers being an only goat.
By the end of the week, Vassilis had been diplomatically rehomed to a nearby olive grove with a view and less judgement. He seemed grateful. Or at least relieved.
Katerina returned to her patrol. She judged. She glared. She resumed her rightful position on the wall behind the bins and resumed glaring at tomatoes for being too smug.
The balance was restored.
Not every goat wants a love story. Some want their chair, their view, and the right to decide who’s allowed to eat near the lemon tree. She was never meant to share her reign.
She is the Goat of Telios.
And she walks alone.
But now she walked with purpose. She leapt onto her favourite chair, after headbutting a stool as she passed just to prove she still could, and chewed the corner of the tablecloth with renewed enthusiasm.
And then she climbed onto a table in the centre of the terrace, stood there like a victorious general surveying her troops, and let out a long, triumphant bleat.
The message was clear: the goat was back in charge.
Chapter Forty
Accidental Icons
It was meant to be temporary.
A one-week return. A nostalgia stunt. A culinary purge.
Zorba had come back to the kitchen like a storm in denim, barking, frying, refusing to acknowledge special requests, and ensuring that no plate left the pass with anything remotely resembling finesse.
We’d expected complaints.
We got applause.
At first, we thought people were too scared to complain.
But then they started coming back.
The same customers who’d been mortally offended by the lack of menus were now standing in line for a plate of lentils and whatever Zorba decided “meat” meant that day.
The reviews kept flooding in. A man from Athens wrote a review titled: “Finally, Someone Told Me No.”
A woman from London posted a photo of a half-burnt sardine with the caption: “Real Food. Real Menace. 5 Stars.”
Someone launched a hashtag: #ZorbaDoesNotCare.
To Zorba’s horror, it trended. Katerina was tagged in most of them.
And we realised, with slow, dawning dread, that we had become cool.
We were just being aggressively, uncooperatively ourselves, rather than “curated” or “rustic-chic”. And people loved it.
Tourists began requesting to be shouted at. Someone asked Alex if she could “be meaner”.
Zorba had come, cooked, and terrified an entire generation of bloggers.
He’d shouted, he’d grilled, he’d turned culinary trends into ash, literally, and then, like a summer storm, he was gone.
Not dramatically, not with a speech. Just… gone. Back to his corner table, leaving behind a taverna that smelled of smoke, salt, and divine retribution.
The menus had vanished overnight, as if they’d never existed. The specials board now bore a single word, chalked in letters so bold you could feel them in your chest: “FOOD”.
And that was all there was to say about it.
The influencers retreated to their rental villas, ring lights clutched to their chests, wondering if they’d witnessed genius or madness. (Or possibly both.) Their reviews spoke of “authentic terror” and “smoky transcendence”, which, in our book, counted as five stars.
Zorba made no declaration of victory. He offered no grand announcement that his work was done. He simply sat back under the tin roof, lit a cigarette, and gave us that look – the one that says: You know where to find me when you lose your minds again.
But something had shifted.
What was supposed to be one glorious week of shouting and grilled truth had, in classic Telios fashion, turned into an indefinite extension. The heat of the grill had done something to Zorba, burned away the last of the silence, sparked something deep in his chest.
He still grumbled, still judged, but there was a lightness in him now. His movements had purpose again. His insults landed with more accuracy. The smoke rose in perfect, disciplined columns, as though the taverna itself had been holding its breath and was finally allowed to exhale.
It was as if, by dragging him back to the grill, we had coaxed him back to life.
And in a village where miracles are rarely tidy and never quiet, that counted as a recovery.
But instead of fading into obscurity, we became… something else.
Maria was the first to notice.
“Look at this,” she said one morning, slapping her notebook on the table. “They’re calling us the ‘punk-rock of Aegean hospitality’.”
Claude’s eyes went wide. “Oh no. We’re edgy now.”
And he was right.
The more chaotic, uncurated, and downright unhelpful we were, the more they loved us.
A blogger posted a photo of Zorba shouting at a tourist with the caption “The Real Greece: Served Hot.” It got fifty thousand likes.
Someone filmed Claude’s “chair installation” and called it “performance art”.
Mary served without smiling once and still got called “an icon of Greek hospitality”.
Even Spiros, who contributed nothing except sullen silence from his bench, was photographed and labelled “the philosopher king of Telios”.
TripAdvisor reviews went from cautious praise to near-religious devotion:
“I came for dinner. I left changed.”
“The goat spoke to me – spiritually.”
“Five stars. Would get yelled at again.”
Maria christened it The Zorba Doctrine: the less we tried, the more they came.
Zorba, of course, refused to acknowledge any of this. He simply grunted, as Theodora found her rhythm again, hurling pans around like a woman possessed.
We hadn’t just survived the onslaught.
We had accidentally created a movement.
People came not despite the chaos, but for it. They wanted to earn their food, to be chastised, to be ignored and shouted at in equal measure.
And we, against all reason, gave it to them.
The next morning, we heard the unmistakable sound of a bus pulling in to the square.
Not the usual rickety blue one from Istiaia; this one was gleaming white, with tinted windows and a slogan on the side that read, “Seek Chaos. Find Yourself.”
The doors hissed open and out stepped thirty identical people: matching tracksuits, matching notebooks, matching expressions of reverent hunger.
Maria nearly dropped her coffee.
Claude whispered, “We’re a cult now.”
Theodora crossed herself twice for emphasis.
Alex set down her glass of wine with the kind of precision that made everyone else go quiet. She stood, scanned the bus full of eager faces looking for chaos, and said, “Right. More chairs. And double the wine. If they’re going to find themselves, they might as well do it drunk.”
And with that, the goat trotted up to the bus steps, planted her hooves like a gatekeeper, and bleated, a single resonant sound that echoed down the square like the starting bell of some great and terrible festival.
Chapter Forty-One
Theodora’s Last Hope
We knew he was coming.
Mary prayed he wouldn’t.
Theodora prayed harder that he would.
The rest of us didn’t care either way, we just knew it was going to be entertaining.
And of course he didn’t arrive on a weekend, when there might have been a ferry crowd to disguise him or a Sunday service to absorb the gossip. No. He arrived on a Tuesday. Mid-week absurdity.
The kind of arrival that cuts through a siesta, startles a chicken off its perch, and makes someone shout, “Did anyone switch the fridge back on?”
First came the sound: not the reassuring rattle of a moped or the battered cough of a fishing van, but a sleek, self-satisfied hum that sounded like it had been imported along with its own playlist.
And then it appeared: a white Tesla, gliding into the square like a swan that had wandered into the wrong pond, silent and certain of its own magnificence.
It stopped in front of the kafenio, right where the old men sit and measure time by the length of their cigarettes. They stared at the car like it had landed from another planet.
Then Andonis stepped out.
White linen trousers, salmon-pink shirt, sunglasses large enough to provide shade for the entire village. In one hand, a leather weekender bag. In the other, a drone. He wore no socks. Naturally.
He turned a slow circle, inhaled as though he were personally blessing the air, and said, “Ah… authenticity.”
Behind him, his luggage followed like loyal disciples. Five matching suitcases, monogrammed, colour-coded, and wholly unnecessary for a two-week visit to a village with one road, two functioning clocks, and no concept of brunch.
From her kitchen window, Theodora watched.
Mary was clearing table four when the world tilted. She stepped outside, dishcloth in hand, blinked into the sun – and froze.
There he was.
Andonis.
Fresh from the ferry, glistening with confidence, dressed like a man who believed linen shirts counted as character.
He beamed, a smile as bright as the Tesla parked behind him. “Maria mou!”
Greek code took over. Hospitality is muscle memory, baked in, like oregano into beans.
She gave a smile. Small. Perfectly polite. The kind you’d offer a stranger at a bus stop, one you hoped was going somewhere else.
“Welcome,” she said, because anything else would have had Theodora lighting candles for her soul.
He took a half-step forward, all choreography and shine.
“Or is it Mary now? I respect your journey.”
Her smile held. Her eyes, however, narrowed like shutters in a windstorm.
“It’s still no,” she said gently – not cruel, not dramatic, just clear – and turned back inside.
