A Nice Meal in Thrace

[sazji]

Funny how a which heading to post under is being determined more by politics than actual geography or culture in this case. I live in Istanbul, a city with Turks and Greeks. I took a trip for New Years over the border to the town of Komotini, where there are lots of...Turks and Greeks. We went to a nice seafood restaurant even closer to the Turkish border, near the village of Maroneia. If we'd had the meal just an hour to the east, I'd be posting in the Middle East and Africa forum. So be it...

I'd been to this place before and love it; it's a very basic fish taverna but extremely good. One of the things I look most forward to are the olives, of a brilliant rich green that I couldn't quite capture. The flavor is amazing; with an almost buttery "finish." We had friends up from Athens who also said they thought about those olives a lot...

Another thing, a bit run of the mill but exceptionally good there are the potoes, which they fry in a huge pot. I think half the bulk of the food we ate that afternoon was of these potatoes...

Another thing I always want when I come to Greece is octopus. Here after beating it's generally boiled first, then grilled, then topped with a dollop of olive oil. The oil there is as good as the olives.

For seafood, we went with the shrimp. These were rolled in flour and fried whole. Oddly enough, they weren't fried at such a high temperature that the shells were edible (a la salt and pepper shrimp). So we did have to shell them. Delicious though.

They also had a nice fresh bunch of red mullet. Much of what is sold as red mullet turns out to be gray mullet; the fish resemble each other but the taste is quite different; red mullet (barbounia/barbunya) has a much cleaner flavor.

In Turkey it seems to be in vogue to say "never put lemon on fish, it masks the flavor," but nobody ever heard of that in Greece. (Yes Ismet, that's for you...)

[kerriar]

Thanks for these photos which bring back memories of eating in the afternoon shade or on warm summer nights last summer in Macedonia and Thrace.

Simple meals using great local ingredients - especially the fish - makes eating here such a pleasure. We spent two weeks around Kavala for a family wedding last summer (Greek/Irish affair) and everybody still talks about the food.

Apart from the wedding day itself there were lunches that seemed to go on for hours and hours with people who had not seen each other in years (both families are scattered across the globe) hopping between tables as dish after dish of delicious mezes, squid, octupus, fishes kept appearing from the kitchen seemingly ad infinitum.

Food like this (and admittedly wine and tsipouro) brings many benefits - it breaks barriers, helps unwinding after long flights and even contibutes to easing small tensions that can bubble under the surface at every family gathering.

Sazji next time I will cross the border and eat on the Turkish side - its been far too long since I've been there.

[zaelic]

It is good to see you have gone the digital camera route, Sazji! We need to watch cig kebab being prepared... from scratch...