My Big Fat Greek Taverna

By Costa Ayiotis

In a moment of madness, Costa Ayiotis, a former United Nations diplomat, quits the Joburg rat race and opens a Greek taverna in Hout Bay. The local barflies and village idiots predict his demise in a notoriously fickle seasonal town. He is determined to prove them wrong. In this refreshingly hilarious rollercoaster of a ride, Costa's fiery Greek temperament is tested by a constant stream of customers from all corners of the planet. A book for anyone who ever yearned to escape from it all.    
     
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melinda Ferguson Books
• Release date: Sep 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781990973772

Costa Ayiotis

Costas Ayiotis is a former lawyer, UN diplomat and restaurateur. He obtained a BA LLB and MA in Applied Ethics from Wits. He represented South Africa at the United Nations in New York where he reported on the Iraq war in the Security Council. He is Joburg based and loves writing, travelling and cooking to relax.

Book preview

Part 1

The Bug Bites

Chapter 1

Smell the lemons: Hout Bay, 1997

A little lemon juice makes everything taste better. – Unknown

When life gives you lemons, you start cooking. A French cook will take a basket of lemons and make a sublime tarte au citron with a flaky crust and a custard filling that finds the perfect balance between the tart and sweet notes. An American cook will make a refreshing lemonade to quench her thirst on a hot summer’s day and a lemon meringue pie to go with her afternoon coffee on the veranda.

Give an English cook lemons and she’ll make a lemon syllabub. If she’s had a tough day in the kitchen, she’ll pour herself gin and tonic with a twist of lemon. Or if her grandparents had grand colonial pretensions from the last convulsions of the Raj, she’ll pour gin, lemon juice, syrup and egg white into a cocktail shaker and top it with club soda to make a refreshing gin fizz. This was the drink that cooled down the wilting memsahibs among their transplanted rose gardens at the hill stations in the foothills of the Himalayas, where they went to escape the oppressive summer heat.

An Italian cook will first think about which antipasti can be served with lemon, and which pasta will make a perfect second act, before finally preparing a classic veal scallopini piccata while sipping on a homemade limoncello.

What does a Greek cook do? He makes an avgolemono – egg and lemon soup, also known as yiayia’s penicillin – and then does what crosses the mind of every Greek at some point in their life. He throws caution to the winds, opens a Greek taverna in a sleepy fishing village on the southern tip of Africa and calls it Lemonia.

For most cooks, the holy trinity is salt, butter and sugar. For Greek cooks, it’s olive oil, oregano and lemon juice. Greek cuisine would be unthinkable without lemons. They provide a distinctive flavour, along with olive oil, oregano and garlic.

The Greeks may have had an ancient and enduring love affair with lemons, but they’re also prone to exaggeration and spontaneous passionate outbursts. Once upon a time, a brave young man had the audacity to blurt out to a Greek taverna proprietor: I don’t like lemon in my food!

The proprietor was stunned, as if he’d been struck by a lightning bolt unleashed from Mount Olympus by Zeus himself. It would have helped matters if he had the aloofness of a ballerina or the dignified, mournful detachment of an undertaker, but he didn’t. He was Greek, and Greeks are temperamental and volatile by nature. Their blood boils over like an unattended copper briki of Greek coffee.

The proprietor threw his hands up in despair, just like Zorba the Greek would have done, and gave full vent to his feelings: "What do you mean you don’t like lemons? Greek cooking is unthinkable without lemons. Sun-ripened lemons give flavour to fish, calamari, lobster, crayfish, sausages, vegetables, dolmathes and chicken. Lemon rind lifts the flavour of sautéed vegetables. On grilled lamb chops, the acid cuts the fat. Lemon peel with baklava cuts the sweetness of the syrup. It even goes with fried cheese – saganaki. Lemon sorbet is the best palate cleanser in the world after a greasy meal. I could go on and on. Not to mention the many health properties of the noble fruit. The list of pairings with food and drinks is endless. Why, lemon goes with everything under the sun!"

Then his monologue meandered into one of his favourite subjects, ancient Greek history. In his biased mind, anything that had its origins in the cradle of Western civilisation was sacrosanct and could not be challenged by other cultures.

It was none other than Alexander the Great who, after invading Asia, discovered the lemon fruit called citron and sent samples back home to his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle. And the rest is history. Mediterranean cuisine was changed forever!

Like a tortoise sensing danger, the young man tucked his head in a few notches, seeking shelter from the madman in front of him. He had touched a raw nerve!

That madman was me. It was a tactless tirade in an unhinged moment, unworthy of a former diplomat. Unable to curb my enthusiasm for lemons and contain my frustration with a fussy customer, the urge to berate him like Basil Fawlty often did in Fawlty Towers became irresistible, which is never a good idea if you want repeat customers. The television comedy that paid homage to sarcasm, manic chaos and farce helped me blow off a little steam when I felt overwhelmed and thought that things were spiralling out of control. Restaurants, like life itself, are sometimes theatres of the absurd.

Sybil, Basil’s long-suffering wife, reprimands him after one of his manic outbursts: You never get it right, do you? You’re either crawling all over them licking their boots or spitting poison at them like some Benzedrine puff adder!

To which he replies with indignation: I’m just trying to enjoy myself!

Fortunately, my Fawlty-like outbursts at the tables were rare and never motivated by malicious intent. Most of the time, diplomacy reigned supreme and suppressed my more theatrical and anarchic urges, which were largely confined to the kitchen.

Young Stelios, my beloved only son, became my most difficult customer. One day, after I squeezed lemon juice over sizzling hot, charcoal-grilled lamb chops straight off the fire, he complained, Baba! I don’t like lemon juice on my chops! In fact, I don’t like lemon on anything!

I was rendered speechless for a moment, as if I’d been slapped in the face with a wet octopus! Then, to rub salt in the wounds, he added, And I also hate olives!

It’s a sad fact of life that those closest to you hurt you the most. When I recovered my composure, I asked him: Are you sure your taste buds are Greek? Your mother’s Dutch genes are responsible for this defect!

Even when it came to cheeses, young Stelios preferred mild soft cheeses like Gouda to the sharper, harder cheeses from Greece and Italy. To redeem himself, he loved eating creamy feta and grilled halloumi – and all was well again in the realm.

To make sure that no one could question my loyalty to the versatile lemon, we planted two lemon trees in large terracotta pots on either side of the entrance to our restaurant. We filled a large Santorini-blue glass bowl with lemons and placed it on a blue metal taverna table at our front door to greet our customers. That is how our restaurant, Lemonia Greek Taverna in the Republic of Hout Bay, got its name.

In planting the lemon trees, I was following a family tradition started by my father. He believed every home needed a lemon tree to provide lemons for the kitchen, an olive tree for peace in the home and a pomegranate tree to bring wealth and abundance.

Lemonia has two meanings in Greek. If the accent falls on the a, it means the lemon tree; if the accent falls on the o, it means lemons. Our Cape Anglo customers, who were more English than the English from Brighton, added an extra vowel. On their languid tongues, it was drawn out to Lemoania. Repeated attempts to correct them proved futile. This made me smile and think of Sybil’s whining voice. It’s exactly how she would have pronounced it.

When I felt exhausted but content after a busy night in the taverna, I would stand outside on the veranda to cool down in the fresh evening breeze that came off the ocean. I would hold some freshly cut lemon peel or a crushed lemon leaf in my hand. The hit of citrus scent would give me an instant energy boost, and the occasional ouzo on the rocks would take off the edge. Sometimes I would squeeze a lemon repeatedly like a stress ball to release the cares of the day, which reminded me of a line from the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles: One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.

Chapter 2

Until death, divorce or debt do us part

Let me cook the dinners of a nation and I shall not care who makes its laws. – Martha McCulloch-Williams, 1913

Before I became a restaurateur, I was a reluctant lawyer and then a willing diplomat. Initially, there was something noble and elevated about studying law at Wits University. You felt you were doing something important that would also confer some kind of status and prestige if you made partner one day. Working as a young candidate attorney at a mid-sized Kempton Park law firm was, however, a rude awakening. Most of the work attorneys do is tedious, repetitive, administrative and procedural in nature. They don’t tell you that at law school.

There’s little room for creativity or innovation when you’re drafting contracts, lease agreements, wills, affidavits, particulars of claim or heads of argument. The incisive cross-examinations, dramatic closing arguments and thrilling plot twists and turns only happen in TV series like LA Law.

You become a slave to the tyranny of the billable hour. There are daily deadlines. You walk into your office every morning and deal with the most urgent matter that’s about to explode in your face. The rest you postpone until another day of looming deadlines. Once you’ve made partner, even when you’ve met your target of billable hours for the month, you suffer from nauseating anxiety about reaching your next monthly target. The stress is a killer. Many attorneys in their mid-forties drop dead from heart attacks.

Judge Louis Harms perfectly summed up how I felt when he said that studying law was sublime, but the practice was vulgar. Appearing in the magistrate’s court every week for Section 65 matters is nothing more than glorified debt collecting, but there is nothing glorious about it. People buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have and get into trouble with compound interest working against them. Issuing default judgments against people and warrants of execution against property makes you feel like a bottom feeder, a predator preying on those helpless souls who are caught in the jaws of a debt trap and have nothing left to pawn.

It was my job to accompany our clients, usually the wives, to divorce court and introduce them to the advocate who would appear on their behalf to plead irreconcilable differences and an irretrievable breakdown of the marriage.

I welcomed the weekly excursion and escape from the office. There were at least 150 unopposed divorces set on the court roll every Wednesday, otherwise known as hump day because you had survived the bumpy ride to the middle of the week. Each uncontested divorce took less than five minutes as the judge granted the orders, working quickly through the morning roll so he’d still have time for an afternoon round of golf. Our female clients often wanted to celebrate their newfound freedom, so they would invite me to La Concorde across the road from the Supreme Court in Johannesburg for a glass of wine or bubbly. I was perhaps guilty of lingering a bit longer than necessary at these post-trial celebrations, delaying my inevitable return to a windowless office to face the stack of brown folders mounting on my desk.

Then there were rare moments of light relief to ease the stress. An Afrikaans female divorce client instructed me one day: My husband is hiding money from me. I want you to liquidise his assets!

I tried to keep a straight face. "I’m afraid we can’t do that, mevrou. If it were only that simple. However, we can request a forensic audit of his financial affairs."

Ag man, then you must just liquidate him!

I wasn’t quite sure which meaning of the word she intended.

These weekly trips to the Supreme Court in Pritchard Street allowed me occasionally to visit my aunt Mary, who was also my nonna godmother. She lived in an airy apartment in Arop House on Von Brandis Street, a historic art deco building a block behind the Supreme Court.

Aunt Mary was like a second mother. She was an excellent cook who had hosted diplomatic dinners in the Soviet Union during the Cold War era. As an embassy wife, she hosted parties and entertained other diplomats with her ex-husband Jimmy Irvine, an intelligence and cipher officer stationed in the British Embassy in Moscow. The KGB bugged their apartment, so when they wanted to talk in private, they had to step outside and talk on the pavement or turn the portable record player up to full volume.

Mary rolled her own phyllo pastry with a long, tapered wooden rod, a skill she had mastered with the help of my yiayia. She made the best tyropita and spanakopita, small phyllo triangles filled with three cheeses and dried mint or spinach and feta. I loved her cabbage dolmathes filled with rice and mince. They were thick and juicy, smothered in a tangy lemon-butter sauce. Her secret was to use lots of clarified butter in the sauce. You could taste the love, care and spirit of generosity rolled into them with her blessed seasoned hands.

Mary was an old-school cook who was not shy to use lots of butter to give maximum flavour to a dish. It was a tip she’d learnt from my yiayia, who loved frying lamb chops in her beloved samna (clarified butter). She believed there were very few dishes that could not be improved with salt and butter.

1986 was an explosive year. The Space Shuttle Challenger blew up and disintegrated seventy-three seconds after lift-off, killing all seven crew members, including teacher Christa McAuliffe. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded, killing thirty-one people. The radioactive contamination spread throughout Europe – including Greece, where people resorted to buying tinned food and bottled water in panic. The US Congress bypassed President Ronald Reagan’s veto and imposed economic sanctions on South Africa. On the home front, Desmond Tutu was elected the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and the South African government renewed the three-year-old State of Emergency, sparking a civil disobedience campaign and widespread international condemnation.

Movies became my tranquilliser of choice. I sought distraction, anonymity and relief in dark cinemas with a box of popcorn on my lap and Maynards wine gums mixed into the popcorn for that sweet and salty hit.

I planned my weekly escapes well. I’d tell our receptionist I was going to grab a quick sandwich and then head off to the magistrate’s court to sort out bills of cost with the clerks of the court. I’d leave my jacket hanging over my chair at the office and disappear at lunchtime, clutching a pile of brown legal folders, to watch Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee, Platoon, 9½ Weeks, Wise Guys, Out of Africa and Heartbreak Ridge.

My happiest moments were spent in cinemas, cafés, restaurants and bars during my lunch breaks. It was a welcome escape from the stress of the office and the stuffy courthouses, which always had a slow, dense energy about them. I lived on coffee, cigarettes and omelettes. As the celebrated chef Wolfgang Puck said, You can eat an omelette at midnight, at lunchtime, all day long. It’s perfect for every occasion.

Barry Katz, my principal and the founding partner, always ordered a plain three-egg omelette when we took breaks. It was one less decision he had to make. The clerks drank and smoked heavily, even in the office on Friday afternoons: packs of Peter Stuyvesant accompanied by black coffee in mugs, heavily laced with brandy. Then the drinking continued with the partners in the boardroom library well into Friday night.

A life spent dealing with deaths, divorces and debtors’ court did not feed my soul. The partners were good to me, but I hated my job and was slowly dying inside. We coined a macabre term for the drawn-out process of administrating wills and deceased estates. We called it eating the dead!

The idea to open my own restaurant wasn’t a sudden epiphany or an Archimedes eureka moment after a hot bath. The idea grew gradually. It was more of a passing fantasy, a daydream that would come and go, but the seed had been planted. The restaurant bug was always there, lying dormant, simmering beneath the surface.

The Eighties was a decade of opportunities and the golden age of restaurants in Johannesburg. The rand was still a strong currency, and corporates had large expense accounts for long, boozy lunches. Many disillusioned attorneys and advocates quit the profession and opened restaurants and steakhouses.

I made up my mind to quit after a veteran attorney opened up to me after a couple of whiskies. He was a divorced, depressed insomniac and a functioning alcoholic, embittered and cynical after one too many legal battles.

He told me what he thought of the legal profession: If you want to breathe free, don’t become a lawyer. This is a mug’s game. You’re still young. Get out while you can. There are better ways to earn a living. There is a presumption of negativity built into everything that we do. We get paid to look on the downside of life. Your clients use you for protection when they need it most, then forget about you and discard you like a used condom soon after.

I slowly realised that I was living my father’s dream of becoming a lawyer, not mine. A family tragedy had prevented him from studying law. His father was hit by a passing car as he stepped off a tram on the dusty streets of Cairo. He died at the age of forty-five, leaving my grandmother a destitute widow at the age of forty to look after three children.

I sat with my father one afternoon, sipping mint tea in his favourite room, our sun-soaked, glass-enclosed veranda that faced the front garden where, twenty years earlier, he had planted the holy trinity – the lemon, olive and pomegranate trees.

I decided to break it to him gently.

I’m going to open a restaurant one day in a small house somewhere. I don’t know when and how that will happen, but that’s the dream.

Chapter 3

Tossed salads and salutes

To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist – the problem is so entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one’s vinegar. – Oscar Wilde

I resigned from the law firm in December 1986. I immediately applied to join the Department of Foreign Affairs, which promised an exciting and far more glamorous diplomatic career representing South Africa on foreign shores. The foreign service suited my temperament a lot better than being an attorney. I went through several security checks, and the security police even visited my parents’ home, presumably to check that my family were not hiding any communists or terrorists under their beds. I appeared before a panel of three veteran diplomats who peppered me with questions on how I would defend the more inhumane and irrational aspects of petty apartheid. How do you reply to a journalist who asks you why a critically injured black person lying bleeding in the street cannot be rushed to hospital in an ambulance reserved for whites only? I replied that I could not defend the morally indefensible. Two female psychologists sitting on the side assessed me and compiled a psychological profile. After the vetting process, the department accepted my