Kokkari

By Erik Cosselmon, Janet Fletcher and Sara Remington

The chef behind San Francisco’s renowned Greek taverna shares recipes that bring old world Mediterranean cuisine to life with contemporary flare.

Kokkari Estiatorio has been a pioneer of Greek-inspired fine dining for decades. Its uniquely welcoming ambiance draws on traditional family recipes and the ancient Hellenic custom of philoxenia: welcoming the stranger as a friend. Through its use of fresh seasonal ingredients, Kokkari brings a refined, cosmopolitan sensibility to a beloved Mediterranean culinary tradition.

Now the owners invite you to try some of their favorite dishes at home with this delectable collection of recipes. From their kitchen to yours, they wish you a Greek bon appetit: kali orexi!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452110318

Book preview

in the greek tradition

a warm welcome

From Our Greek-Inspired Kitchen

If you relish backstage moments, come to Kokkari late on a winter afternoon when we are preparing for the evening service. Order a glass of sparkling wine at the bar and watch dusk descend on Jackson Square, in San Francisco’s historic Antiques District. A whole lamb will be spinning languidly in the fireplace, the embers snapping, the juices hissing as they hit the potatoes roasting underneath. You won’t see the servers folding napkins and finishing their family meal in the rear dining room, but soon they will rise, straighten their ties, and switch on the parchment-shade lamps that make Kokkari glow.

Erik Cosselmon, Kokkari’s chef, will come into the front dining room to check the lamb and baste it with drippings and lemon juice to help the skin caramelize. Fredy Parra will begin to organize the bread station on the antique butcher’s block by the hearth, stocking the mammoth grape harvester’s basket with country loaves and focaccia and lining bread baskets with thick white napkins.

The first dinner guests will arrive soon, unbundling scarves, relinquishing coats, and relishing the dining room’s warm embrace. You can’t help but admire, from your barstool perch, the handsome details that set this stage: the wide-plank oak floors softened with richly woven rugs; the heavy wooden ceiling beams and burnished copper pots; the shapely terra-cotta urns and tapestries; and the fire’s hypnotic flame. A glazed tureen with graceful handles holds glistening mixed olives, and the linen-draped tables gleam with polished stemware. The look weaves rustic with urbane, like an Old World farmhouse restored with taste.

In the rear dining room, with its open kitchen and white-jacketed cooks, the tempo is already quickening. The communal table is a sea of suits by now, its well-dressed occupants passing platters of mezedes. Skillets mounded with cooked greens, horta, are steaming and sizzling on the stove, as cooks slide Kalamata pita and whole fish into the wood-burning oven, drizzle olive oil over cumin-spiced meatballs, and arrange thick slices of spit-roasted lamb on crusty potatoes. The cooks dutifully wipe the plate rims and set the orders on the counter for pickup. Then the expediter—the chef on duty—rewipes the plate rims. Then the server arrives and, reflexively, wipes the plate rims. Every employee is a critic here.

A monumental braised lamb shank, set on its thick end and showered with myzithra cheese, leaves a scent trail of cinnamon as a waiter carries it aloft through the dining room. Could one person eat all that? The server sets it in front of a wisp of an elderly woman, who daintily tucks her napkin into her blouse and dives in.

At the pastry end of the kitchen, a cook adds a birthday candle to a galaktoboureko—custard wrapped in phyllo pastry—then spoons a ribbon of honey over a plate of thick yogurt with dates. The evening’s earliest diners are already sipping inky Greek coffee, made the ancient way, in a slender copper pot on a bed of hot sand.

a fresh sensibility

Well into its second decade, Kokkari remains one of the busiest establishments in the most influential restaurant city in the nation. One first-time customer, marveling at the frenetic pace on a weeknight, asked her waiter, What are you giving away here?

Clearly, Erik and his team are offering the kind of food people want to eat: modern Greek cuisine with a California fresh sensibility. But we also know that patrons return because they have such a good time at the restaurant. Memorable food is, we hope, always part of the Kokkari experience, but we think diners are also responding to the warmth of Greek hospitality.

a heritage of hospitality

The Greeks have a word for the way we try to treat our guests: philoxenia. It’s hard to pronounce (fih-lox-sen-EE-ya) but an easy concept to grasp. To a Greek, philoxenia is the art of making a stranger a friend. It means receiving people with genuine concern for their welfare, whether you know them or not. In a proper Greek home, you can hardly cross the threshold before you are offered a glass of ice water, some coffee, or a sweet. Even the ninety-year-old mother of Kokkari co-owner Kenny Frangadakis will immediately sit a visitor down and say, Let me get you some fruit.

Driven by notions of philoxenia, Kokkari co-owner George Marcus (Moutsanas) aspired to create a restaurant that guests would never want to leave. He had to be persuaded that this admirable sentiment was not financially viable. But the philosophy still drives the welcome at Kokkari, where walk-in patrons are never turned away. We may be fully booked, but any guest with the patience to wait will dine with us before the night ends. Despite our stated closing hours, our kitchen does not close until everyone who wants to eat here has been seated and fed.

Every cook willing to make the effort to secure good ingredients can reproduce the food at Kokkari. The recipes that follow are the detailed blueprint. The collection includes several family favorites—primarily from George’s mother, Maria, Kenny’s mother, Kay, and Kenny’s wife, Angie—that evolved into dishes served at Kokkari today. We hope you will reproduce them at home with a spirit of philoxenia, which is, for all the food at Kokkari, the final seasoning.

the domain of the yia yias

The dishes at Kokkari have a polished appearance, but they were born in grandmothers’ kitchens. Everyone has grandmothers, but Greek grandmothers—known as yia yias—are different. Just ask a Greek.

The yia yia is the matriarch of the multigenerational Greek household, and her realm is the kitchen. (Of course, we are largely talking about the old days; modern Greek women are as educated and career minded as their American counterparts.) Yia yias do not want or expect their kids to grow up and leave the nest. If you have traveled in Greece, you may have noticed that many homes have unfinished second stories. That’s for the adult children who presumably will marry, return home, finish the second floor, and produce the offspring necessary to every yia yia.

For a long time, George’s mother would not allow anyone in the kitchen with her. This is typical yia yia behavior, a means, perhaps, of consolidating and securing power. It was years before she would consent to teach George’s wife, Judy, her recipes, like tyropita, kotopita, and fish plaki.

When we opened Evvia, Kokkari’s elder sibling, we didn’t hire a Greek chef. We hired a talented chef (he was Italian) and had Angie teach him the Greek ways. She was our conduit to the yia yias’ kitchen because she had learned at her own mother’s side and would soon be a yia yia herself.

To a grandchild, a yia yia is the dependably gentle and loving presence, the one who always has fragrant cookies baking and can be counted on for unconditional love. To a yia yia, grandchildren are blameless and their secrets secure. No matter what bad behavior she has witnessed, she will tell the parents, I’m not talking.

The yia yias are the guardians of Greek culinary tradition. They store the family recipes in their heads and hands and maintain the practices of foraging and preserving. Kenny’s mother, in California, always kept galoshes in her car in case she spied some snails (a Cretan favorite) or some wild field greens suitable for horta. After Angie married Kenny and moved sixty miles away, Angie’s mother would send horta to them—the wild greens washed and bagged and shipped via UPS—so that the family would not go without.

Angie’s mother also knew every farmer near her home in Lodi, California, and she would bake them baklava in return for being allowed to glean their fresh walnuts or grape leaves. When Angie’s parents came to visit, the car’s trunk would be packed with persimmons, lemons, patiently shelled walnuts, home-dried figs, and homemade wine cookies, tomato sauce, and quince jelly. Yia yias do not know how to rest.

To a Greek or Greek-American, family means everything. Because the generations remain so close, the food culture stays intact, with recipes and rituals passed down in unbroken succession. It is with fond memories of our yia yias and respect for their tireless work that we offer so many dishes at Kokkari—like papoutsakia (Stuffed Eggplant Slippers,), kokkinisto me manestra (Braised Lamb Shanks with Orzo and Myzithra,), and soutzoukakia (Spiced Meatballs with Tomato and Green Olive Sauce,)—that could have come from their hands. Throughout this book, set against black backdrops, you will find recipes that come directly from the families, and that form the foundations of Kokkari’s menu.

a. the soul of greek cuisine

b. notes on ingredients

in the kitchen

the soul of greek cuisine

The Defining Flavors

The core flavors that shape our food at Kokkari derive from Greek tradition. Although we operate in San Francisco and draw on the bounty of Northern California, we owe our culinary aesthetic to Greece, where diners take more pleasure in quality ingredients than in artful embellishment. A platter of red mullet, lightly floured and fried, is a feast to a Greek. Only a cook who lacked confidence would add anything more than lemon halves, and perhaps skordalia, to such a gift from the sea.

We admire the Greek cook’s restraint and respect for pure flavors—the sweetness of baby lamb, the tang of thick homemade yogurt, the woodsy scent of wild oregano. We may have modernized many of the Greek dishes on our menu—often by reducing the olive oil or shortening the cooking time that a yia yia might deem correct—but we try never to stray from the signature tastes of the Greek table.

A country with dramatically varied landscapes and widely dispersed archipelagos, Greece does not have a monolithic cuisine. Cretans, with their homegrown olive oil and passion for wild greens, have naturally developed a culinary repertoire distinct from that of the isolated mountain dwellers and shepherds in Epirus or the cosmopolitan denizens of Athens. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a singularly Greek flavor palette, a collection of ingredients and foodways that help define a cuisine.

While recognizing that the Greek kitchen is far more varied than any overview can suggest, we think of the following foods and flavors as fundamentally Greek, inspiring and defining what we do at the restaurant.

olive oil for aroma and body

olive oil is more than just a cooking medium in the Kokkari kitchen. It is the foundation on which almost every savory dish rests. Used liberally, it adds silky body and lush richness to braised dishes and a fragrant gloss to grilled octopus and boiled greens. It mingles with tomato juices in horiatiki salata (Greek salad) to produce an irresistible sop for bread. No Greek thinks of olive oil as a precious condiment to dole out in fine drizzles, and no cook would send a meze like favasalata or tyrosalata to the table without a glistening puddle of extra-virgin olive oil on top.

So enamored are Greeks of olive oil that in some recipes it is almost the star. Greeks call such preparations lathera—literally, olive oil dishes, from the Greek word for oil, lathi. Spinach and Rice and Okra with Tomato, Saffron, and Dill are classic examples of home-style lathera cooking, as is the restaurant’s Summer Vegetable Stew. These are the satisfying vegetarian dishes that observant Greeks rely on during Lent.

tomatoes and other sweet notes

Whether fresh or canned, simmered into a sauce or reduced to a paste, tomatoes add sweetness to savory dishes. Vegetables like green beans, zucchini, artichokes, fava beans, and okra are routinely stewed with tomatoes. Tomato sauce cloaks the ground lamb in moussaka and pastitsio, provides the brick-red hue in kokkinisto (reddened braised lamb shanks), and bathes baked gigandes (giant white beans). Greeks prefer their salad tomatoes on the firm and tart side, not red all over. When they ripen fully and fill with juice, tomatoes are perfect for dakos (Cretan Barley Rusks,). When we use canned tomatoes, we prefer Italian San Marzano because they break down readily in sauces and have a concentrated flavor. honey sweetens many desserts and numerous savory dishes. At Kokkari, we use it in flatbread dough, in a lemony dressing for a persimmon salad, in the meat sauce for moussaka and pastitsio, and drizzled over thick yogurt for dessert. Sweetness can also come from ouzo, the anise-scented liqueur, which we splash into kakavya, a fish and shellfish stew, and whisk into a light dressing for cured salmon.

lemons and other tangy flavors

Non-Greeks are often astonished at how much lemon Greek cooks use. Seafood requires lemon, of course, but even grilled lamb rarely arrives at the table without lemon halves. The same goes for horta, cooked seasonal greens, which get a squeeze of lemon at the table. Many cooks, including those at Kokkari, baste roasted meats with lemon juice; its natural sugar helps the surface brown and crisp. Whisked with egg, lemon makes avgolemono, the foamy enrichment for chicken-rice soup; the luscious sauce for braised stuffed cabbage; and the finishing touch for a braised winter dish made with pork and celery. wine vinegar steps in when bolder tartness is required: to sharpen braised short ribs, balance the sweetness of beets, or enliven a Greek salad. yogurt supplies acidity, too: in marinades for souvlaki; in dips like tzatziki; and in simple sauces for stuffed grape leaves or grilled meats. No yogurt surpasses luscious Greek yogurt, and Greeks savor it daily. Even at a good restaurant, the meal may end with nothing fancier than a platter of luxuriously thick yogurt topped with a syrupy spoon

Reviews for Kokkari

[auntie0nanuuq · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Baaaaaaa..... Lamb, lamb & more lamb!

This book is very nicely put together & the presentation is lovely. All of the basic ingredients are pictured & explained as is the tradition of Greek hospitality.

The recipes are tempting, and if you like lamb as much as I do, well there are many recipes that will make you happy. The Bizelosalata (Sweet Green Peas w/ feta) sounded marvelous as did the: Grilled octopus w/ lemon & olive oil; Grilled calamari stuffed w/ feta, mint & orange; Tyropita (cheese stuffed filo); Lamb eggplant casserole w/ custard topping; & Braised pork w/ celery & avgolemono.

I'm looking forward to trying the lamb riblets w/ lemon & oregano and the grilled octopus.....