Zorba's Taverna: The Trouble With Goats and Mayors, page 3
What he did not say was that the “group” consisted of 42 Athenian yiayiades. Each one with arthritis in the knees, righteousness in the bones, and at least three generations of culinary superiority flowing through their veins.
Zorba’s Taverna was about to receive the ultimate test.
The bus arrived with the energy of a Trojan horse. Doors hissed open. Feet descended. Umbrellas were unsheathed like bayonets. They came in floral prints, orthopaedic sandals, and expressions that could cause milk to curdle.
Alex appeared at the gate. “No,” she said. Only that. Then she turned to Theodora. “Battle stations.”
Inside, George calmly refilled the cheese drawer. Mary tied her hair back with the air of a woman about to charm or kill. Dimitri hid the octopus, not because it wasn’t fresh, but because he feared for its soul.
Claude ran off to hang bunting. Eleni reached for her strongest stamp. I, naturally, grabbed a pen. Useless in a fight, but excellent for recording the casualties.
The first yiayia entered. Marched past the tables. Walked straight into the kitchen.
No hellos. Just a sniff and a narrowed eye.
“Where is the ladle?” she asked.
Theodora, already seething, pointed. “In my hand.”
Another arrived. “Why is the grill cold?”
“It’s not,” said George, turning it up.
The floodgates opened. One by one, they entered the sacred kitchen space. Theodora’s realm. Our temple. Within minutes it had become a battleground of conflicting wisdom and passive-aggressive expertise.
“This oregano is tired.”
“Who taught you to salt beans like that?”
“My cousin’s daughter’s neighbour is a chef in Piraeus, and even she wouldn’t dare boil this cabbage.”
One leaned into a pot, sniffed deeply, and said, “Too much onion.”
Another leaned into the same pot two minutes later: “Not enough onion.”
Theodora flinched – inwardly – then turned to George with the calm of a woman announcing the weather.
“I’m going to jail today,” she said matter-of-factly, reaching for her apron like it might double as legal defence. Meanwhile, Mary tried to steer the rest toward the tables with her usual weapon of choice: grace.
“Would you like to sit, kyria?” she offered sweetly.
“I’ll sit when I see the fish,” came the reply.
Dimitri burst into the taverna with the theatrical flair of a man delivering a national treasure, lugging a crate of the day’s catch as though he’d heroically plucked it straight from Poseidon’s beard. He was glistening with seawater, sweat, and misplaced confidence.
The Athens yiayias, all forty-three of them, armed with handbags, prayer beads, and weaponised opinions, immediately swarmed around him like piranhas in floral cardigans.
He set the crate down with a grunt. “Fresh from the rocks,” he declared. “Still dreaming of the sea.”
One yiayia leaned in. “That one’s cloudy-eyed.”
“Cloudy? It’s soulful!” Dimitri insisted.
Another poked a silver specimen with a crucifix. “Looks like it died of embarrassment.”
A third yiayia, whose earrings could pick up satellite channels, sniffed loudly. “You call this a red mullet? I’ve seen redder faces at funerals.”
Dimitri’s grin faltered.
One particularly fierce granny, wielding a lace fan like a judge’s gavel, pointed to a bream. “This one’s bloated. You leave it too long in the sun?”
“No! It’s just… robust,” Dimitri offered weakly.
“They smell wrong,” someone suggested.
“Smells fine to me,” said Dimitri, sniffing a sea bass defensively.
“Are you sure they’re fresh, koumparé?” came the reply.
“They were swimming this morning!”
“Towards what? A sewer?”
“Back in my day,” one yiayia announced, arms crossed like a general, “you’d never serve this in a house with dignity. We’d have thrown it to the cat.”
The cat wandered past, sniffed the crate, and left silently. It was devastating.
They picked through the crate like forensic inspectors at a crime scene. Tails were lifted, gills examined, tiny fish interrogated for their culinary intentions.
One pulled out what might have been a sardine. “What’s this one even trying to be?”
“A lesson,” said her friend.
And then, with a communal sigh of dismay and the solemnity of a church committee about to reject a bake sale, they turned to Dimitri.
“Young man,” said the eldest, adjusting her orthopaedic sandals, “go back to the sea. Apologise to it.”
By the time they moved on to critiquing the kitchen knives, Dimitri was complaining to himself in the corner, nursing a bruised ego and possibly a tsipouro.
Most of the fish were quietly sent to the back of the kitchen, their fate postponed.
And the yiayias? They made their way behind the counter, sleeves rolled, opinions sharpened.
One brought out a lemon and held it up dramatically. “Did you pick this in anger?”
Claude arrived with a jug of wine and said something poetic about Dionysus. One of them slapped his hand away from the olives and told him not to waste time talking when the tzatziki still needed straining.
Zorba didn’t move. He sat by the door, arms folded, one eyebrow arched in a way that suggested he’d seen wars with fewer casualties.
Father Evangelos was summoned to “bless the kitchen before someone swears”.
He arrived, saw the chaos, and promptly blessed himself.
The kitchen now had nine active cooks, three arguing over whether lentils needed mint, one restocking the fridge, and two demanding access to the storeroom to see the potatoes. Theodora defended the pans like a lioness defending her cubs. George guarded the feta.
Alex tried to restore order.
“Theodora runs this kitchen!” she shouted.
“No, she organises it,” a yiayia corrected. “Running requires soul.”
And then, from somewhere near the sink: “The spirit of your moussaka is willing. But your béchamel is weak.”
Outside, the tables groaned under the weight of unsolicited wisdom. Yiayiades were shouting across the terrace in the universal language of culinary judgment:
“Did you see the rice?”
“It was trembling.”
“Too much salt. Or too little. Depends how much you care about your arteries.”
“I had a dream once where the pastitsio was perfect. This is not that dream.”
And yet, they ate.
Every bite came with commentary. Every swallow with a side of advice. And every glance towards the kitchen with the expectation of repentance.
But then came dessert.
Vassiliki, quiet until now, emerged with her tray of galaktoboureko like an ancient priestess revealing the oracle. She said nothing, but placed it gently on the table.
One yiayia spooned a bite into her mouth. Paused.
“My grandmother made it like this,” she said softly.
The others stopped. Tasted. Remembered.
“I was a child again,” someone whispered. “In Kalamata. Before the war.”
Silence descended.
Then: “You used semolina?”
“Yes,” said Vassiliki.
“Good,” the woman said. “Otherwise, I’d have to kill you.”
They left as they came – loud, opinionated, floral – but somehow healed. Whether it was the food, the laughter, or the brief skirmish over the olive oil, no one could say. But as the bus disappeared in a cloud of dust and eucalyptus rub, the taverna exhaled.
Theodora leaned on the counter. “If I ever see another floral handbag in my kitchen–”
George handed her a biscuit.
Alex flopped into a chair.
“They stormed us,” she growled.
“And we fed them,” I said.
“Barely.”
Zorba stood, stretched, and said simply, “Now you’re ready.”
“For what?” asked Mary.
“For everything,” he replied.
And we believed him.
Because if you can survive a bus full of grandmothers, you can survive anything. Even the tourism board.
After the Storm
The kitchen, once a battlefield, now smelled of thyme and liniment.
Chairs were crooked. Plates were empty. George had gone to lie down somewhere cool. Theodora was polishing a ladle like it had been through combat, which, to be fair, it had. And the rest of us were still counting spoons to make sure none had been taken as souvenirs or weapons.
That’s when Alex found it.
Tucked beside the napkin holder, half-hidden under a stray crumb of koulourakia: a rosary. Wooden. Worn smooth by decades of faith and fingers. The kind your grandmother would use in church, in traffic, and during long conversations about your life choices.
No note. No name. Simply the gentle presence of something sacred left behind.
“It was deliberate,” said Father Evangelos, who had appeared as if summoned by the scent of spiritual residue. “They leave things sometimes. When they’ve been moved.”
“Or when they’re plotting something,” said Alex.
He shrugged. “Same thing, really.”
Mary picked it up reverently, set it on the shelf behind the counter, next to the olive oil and the emergency raki. A quiet shrine to chaos, holiness, and elderly ferocity.
But the rosary wasn’t the only thing left behind.
Later that night, when we were wiping down the tables and pretending the fridge didn’t sound like it was dying in Morse code, Theodora found something else.
A folded piece of paper.
Slipped into the cutlery drawer, carefully tucked between the forks and wisdom.
It was a recipe. Handwritten. In perfect, spidery script.
“Dolmadakia tou Theou” – vine leaves of the Lord.
Instructions. Ingredients. Warnings. A final note: “Only make these when you truly forgive someone. Otherwise, they’ll be bitter.”
Theodora stared at it.
“Well?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she folded it back up, slipped it into her apron pocket, and went back to stirring the soup.
We never found out who left it. No one returned to claim the rosary. No yiayia phoned to check on the missing beads. And no one mentioned the incident again.
But the next time dolmadakia appeared on the menu, they were softer. Richer. Forgiving.
And Theodora, for once, smiled while cooking.
We didn’t ask why.
Because in Telios, you learn not to ask too many questions about the divine, the dead, or grandmothers with unfinished business.
You just eat the food.
And say thank you.
Even if no one’s there to hear it.
Chapter Four
The Five-Metre Menace
Telios had a mayor. Technically.
His name was Stavros. He lived two villages away and appeared twice a year, as reliable as a tax demand and almost as welcome. He would roll into town in a cloud of exhaust and self-importance, armed with a clipboard and the unique gift of turning happiness into a violation.
Stavros was no leader, no visionary. He was a man who could spot joy from fifty paces, something homemade, sunlit, vaguely salty, and promptly declare it illegal.
You liked your olive oil fresh from the village press? Cloudy, golden, singing of the hillside? Sorry. Needs a barcode.
You fancied calamari by the shore, your toes flirting with the tide? Dangerous. Environmentally suspect. Potentially criminal.
You enjoyed a chair wobbling companionably outside a kafenio, the kind that came with a view of the sea and unsolicited life advice? Too close to the edge. A hazard. Stavros struck.
This was the Five-Metre Rule, a law that arrived from Athens like a rumour wrapped in official notices, declaring that no table, no chair, no shred of joy should stray within five metres of the sea.
It was meant to stop beach discos, neon cocktail bars, and Mykonos basslines you could hear from space. The result? Chairs dragged inland, patios bulldozed, terraces uprooted by honest-to-goodness JCBs, diggers rumbling like mechanised grief, tearing up stones laid by grandfathers who knew nothing of planning permission but everything about love. It was like being told that sunsets were now available only via approved slideshow.
The new rule sent shockwaves. Tables retreated away from the sea. Some tavernas folded. Others lied. Ours sulked. Zorba, in defiance, folded his arms and declared that if he couldn’t hear the waves, he wasn’t serving the sardines, and promptly closed.
Where we saw heritage, Stavros saw hazard tape. Where we saw charm, he saw non-compliance. And when he finally turned back towards his own village, trailing bureaucracy like a bad smell, we were left blinking in the sun, wondering why spontaneity required such thorough policing.
Because in Telios, joy is handmade. Unruly. Served with bread and shouted across the road. It doesn’t fit into forms. It pours too much wine and insists on sitting by the sea.
Strangely, two villages down, the tables are still there, lined up along the beach, stubborn as old fishermen, clinging to the sand like gossip to a yiayia. The Five-Metre Rule, it seems, is highly location-sensitive.
But we remembered how it used to be. And we weren’t quite ready to let go of the sea, the salt, or the simple, glorious crime of eating octopus with a view.
All this, in Greece. A country where entire meals are conducted with your feet in the sand, your elbows on the table, and your chair half-buried in a dune. A country where octopus drying on a washing line counts as advertising. Where the sea isn’t scenery, it’s seasoning.
Ah yes, but there was another rule to be obeyed too. The Smoking Ban.
Now, of course, most reasonable people will agree smoking is unsociable, filthy, and a proven health hazard. It stains your teeth, your fingers, and occasionally, the lace curtains. Brussels, in its infinite wisdom, decided it was time to save us from ourselves. A well-meaning decree: no cigarettes in enclosed public spaces. Logical. Civilised. Sensible.
But logic doesn’t always get invited to dinner in Greece.
You see, in our village, smoking wasn’t a habit, it was a punctuation mark. Conversations never ended without it. Arguments never began without it. A kafenio without the soft haze of cigarette smoke was like a church without icons: cleaner, perhaps, but strangely hollow.
This wasn’t about nicotine. It was about ritual. Identity. A generation that lit up not for rebellion, but because their father did, and his father before him. Usually after building a house with his bare hands or surviving a minor dictatorship.
So when the regulation arrived, delivered in bureaucratic blue envelopes, with warnings and fines and polite threats of EU disapproval, the villagers nodded. Smiled. Lit another cigarette. And opened a window.
Because here, change doesn’t come by force. It comes slowly. On the wind. Through conversation. Through the stubborn belief that even if something’s bad for us, we’d rather arrive at that conclusion ourselves, ideally over coffee, with someone grumbling about Brussels and passing the ashtray.
We’ll get there. Eventually. But on our own terms. Preferably with a match.
It was a noble effort. A grand gesture. A bold, deeply theoretical attempt to align Greece with European norms, the kind of law that looks excellent printed in Helvetica on glossy paper, and utterly delusional once it crosses the Adriatic heading for us.
Posters arrived. Big ones. Bold red. Slightly aggressive, like they’d been designed by someone who’d never been loved. “NO SMOKING,” they screamed. In six languages, to make sure no one could claim ignorance. They were handed out by a nervous man from the regional office who wore a tie despite the heat and insisted on saying “health and safety” like it was a spell.
In Zorba’s, the sign was given the respect it deserved. Laminated. Gently wiped. Then ceremoniously placed beside the ashtray, as a coaster. It held up remarkably well under the weight of ouzo glasses.
Of course, everyone in the village smoked. From teenagers to priests. Katerina the goat had been seen nosing around a half-lit roll-up, and no one ruled out second-hand addiction. So naturally, everyone in the village completely ignored the ban. Not rudely. Just… completely.
They smoked in the taverna. They smoked outside the taverna. They smoked in the post office, the bakery, and during weddings. During the annual Easter vigil, there were more Marlboros than candles.
I’ll always remember one of my earliest, most educational introductions to Greece.
Long ago, in another life, I was still English. Alex fixed that fairly quickly. I had toothache, a wisdom tooth. Proof that the body occasionally tries to grow something useful, only to have it painfully removed later. Mine had decided to erupt. It was somewhere near August. Alex, in her usual, terrifyingly efficient way, said, “I have a friend.”
Her friend was a dentist. We were booked in for “a quick coffee and a small extraction”, which seemed to be presented as a sort of social double-feature. At that time, we both smoked. Alex with her Rothmans, me with something called Embassy, chosen largely because it was on sale and came with a free lighter shaped like a horseshoe.
We arrived late, on purpose. This was not only accepted; it was expected. Any earlier would have been rude.
The surgery was, at first glance, familiar. Chair. Sink. That faint, metallic smell of disinfectant and fear. But there was no bib. That was the first surprise. The second was the ashtray. It was placed squarely on my chest. Alex settled into a chair beside me. The dentist took her position on the other side. They both lit up.
“Don’t mind us,” Alex said, waving smoke from my face. “We’re just catching up.”
And they did. Coffee arrived at some point. My tooth disappeared shortly after. It was the only time I’ve had dental work performed while my healthcare team casually discussed holidays in Syros over espressos and ash.
