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Gyros just aren't as good any more since I've had the real thing. I doubt any streetside gyros vendor in Athens would pass any American health code ever enacted, but who cares.
And real gyros have a french fry tucked inside the pita.
Now I'm all hungry. Posts: 720 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
I had some really great greek food from a street vendor in Paris even though my professor had told us not to eat down what she called "Microbe Alley." Mmmm.... microbes.
The scariest street food I ever ate was a one-peso taco at a stand by the bus station in Oaxaca. I watched the guy pull out a big pile of tripe, hack a piece off with a cleaver, and throw it on his little grill with some spices.
That may or may not be scarier, now that I come to think of it, than the homemade popsicle that tasted like liquid amoxycilin and used a reed for a stick.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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quote:Gyros just aren't as good any more since I've had the real thing. I doubt any streetside gyros vendor in Athens would pass any American health code ever enacted, but who cares.
And real gyros have a french fry tucked inside the pita.
So true. So very very true. And it's normally not just a french fry, it's a handful or two. Mmm... that brings back memories of Varnava Square.
quote:It's all Greek to me.
In Greek, they say "It's all Chinese to me." I suppose that would be one of the languages more difficult than Greek...
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When I was in Greece, we never had a salad that was pure lettuce. It was always mixed with cabbage, or pure cabbage. And all we got for dressing were little bottles of olive oil and vinegar.
I'm always very sad when I see "Greek salad" offered at restaurants here, with no cabbage. And that they have dressings.
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I always went for the horiatiki salad (tomatoes, feta, cucumbers, onions). Horiatiki salad, crusty bread, and a plate of olives, fantastic lunch. Especially with retsina from a cask.
The gyros I got usually only had a french fry or two tucked in there. One place in Kalamata did put more in, and those were probably my favorite gyros, but I had a local guide in Kalamata (my friend's fiance) so it stands to reason that we'd find the best gyros.
I really should have gone shopping on my way home.
posted
I've never had Greek food that I'm convinced was particularly authentic. Now, I've eaten authentic Lebanese before (in the home of one of my students who was from Lebannon), and that's similar, but it's not the same I'm sure.
The scariest street vendor fare I've had was probably in a back soi in Thailand. We were starving, and there was this guy selling pad thai. No idea why he wasn't selling it out on a main street, but if I hadn't been so hungry I wouldn't have touched his food with a pole. As it was, though, we wolfed it down, and it was easily the tastiest pad thai I've ever had. I remember that he provided us with chairs that appeared to be held together with baling wire.
Great, now I'm all hungry too!
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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When I was in Greece (1995), the Greek salads consisted of half a tomato, some large longitudinal slices of cucumber and a slab of Feta cheese, all doused in a healthy volume of olive oil. Sometimes there were olives, sometimes not.
quote:When I was in Greece, we never had a salad that was pure lettuce. It was always mixed with cabbage, or pure cabbage. And all we got for dressing were little bottles of olive oil and vinegar.
quote:When I was in Greece (1995), the Greek salads consisted of half a tomato, some large longitudinal slices of cucumber and a slab of Feta cheese, all doused in a healthy volume of olive oil. Sometimes there were olives, sometimes not.
Ours were much more like the latter: large chunks of tomato, cucumber, with some cabbage, onions, olives, a huge chunk of feta on top, and yes, doused in too much olive oil. I was never a huge fan of them, but they were at every meal we ate out, pretty much.
I also really miss the bakeries on every street corner. And the gyros. Especially the gyros.
Which reminds me... if anyone's ever in the Northeast Wisconsin area (Green Bay or Door County), there's a place that sells darn near authentic gyros - Perry's Cherry Diner. The guy who owns them (one in each location) is Greek, so he knows what he's doing. When I was home for Thanksgiving, my sister and I went before going to see a movie, and it was the most authentic (fast-food style) one I've had since I've been back. Yummy!
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I didn't like the bakeries that much except for that ubiquitous crusty bread served with every meal. Greek bakery sweets all seem to be some combination of phyllo, honey, cinnamon, and nuts, just present in different proportions.
My favorite snack in Greece was the Papadopolous-brand cocoa-filled crossant. That and a cup of Nes, poli gliko, made a nice afternoon treat on a sunny day.
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In Thailand bread is something of an exotic oddity (unlike Laos, where the French made baguettes a lasting part of the cuisine). In all of the convenience stores I visited in Chiang Mai and Lampang they sold individually packages slices of "buttered bread", which was what looked like a slice of wonderbread with a large square dyed yellow in the center, with waxed paper over the yellow square, and the whole thing packaged in a clear airtight baggie. I wish I'd brought a couple slices home with me.
My favorite on the street snacks there were dried, possibly fried (never could quite tell, and my Thai was only good enough to converse with patient people, which this vendor definitely wasn't) sweetened bananas cut like crinkle cut french fries, tubes of bamboo stuffed with sweet-salty coconut stickyrice dotted with black beans (you peeled these like bananas), and baggies of sticky rice with various dipping sauces. Different things were available in different places, but luckily the sticky rice with dipping sauces was sold by the people who did my laundry, right across from my guest house in Chiang Mai. I loved being able to eat that stuff every day.
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Our bakery (well, the one closest to our school) wasn't so much a confectionary, as over half the bakeries were, but sold more actual breadstuff. Though thinking on it, a lot of the stuff was related to phyllo... Hmm. Anyway, they had these individual "pizzas" which were awesome. And the chocolate pastries. And when we were on Aegina for a day trip, the bakery we found there had this powdered sugar doughnut-y concoction.
But "our" bakery sold lots of bread, and it was all wonderful. And cheap!
(And poli gliko? Wimp! It was metrios at most for me, but most often sketos. )
Posts: 3932 | Registered: Sep 1999
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A lifelong "coffee, black" drinker, I was introduced to the wonders of gliko by my friend's fiance (first week I was there)/husband (second week I was there). I never looked back. Whether Nes or Cafe Eleniko, I'll take the sugar, please.
With the Nes, the trick is to cream together the crystals, sugar, and condensed milk before adding the water. Heaven.
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So, Int 3 and Carrie, what brought you guys to Greece? Where were you exactly? When were you there? For how long? Getting over that way is definitely on my list of places to go, althogh I'm more interested in some of the Greek islands, such as Cos, and sites in western Turkey than I am in continental Greece. Basically, if it was a center of Aesclepius worship, I want visit it. Cos and Pergamum are high on the list. Epidaurus on the mainland too of course, but the later sites are of more interest to me.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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A friend from high school met a Greek man at the university, then went over there to live. I went over for the wedding in Calamata. I was there two and a half weeks, first week with the happy couple in Athens and Calamata, then spent a week traveling all over the country, then spent a few days in Athens with two 18-year-old East German girls I met on the street (this was '92 and the East Germans still seemed to consider themselves separate from the West Germans).
Those two were a hoot. They were following me away from a bus station because I looked like I knew where I was going. We ended up sharing a hostel just off the Platia Plaka and painting Athens red.
Greece used to be cheap, I hear it is much less so now.
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I did a semester abroad there. We lived in Athens, in the Pangrati district, at the top of a rather large hill. Seems everything's either at the top or the bottom of a hill there, at least when you're walking. While we lived in Athens, we took four trips around the mainland: a short-ish one (three/four days) through the Argolid (Epidauros, Mycenae, Tiryns and the like), a longer one through the Peloponnese, one to northwestern Greece (Dodona, Meteora, stopped at Delphi, naturally), and one to Thessaloniki (with a long stop at Vergina).
I was there this past spring semester, for about four months. It was wonderful, as they were setting up for the Olympics and you could feel the excitement (and tension and doubts) mounting. We lived about three blocks from the Panathenaiko (Kalimarmara) Stadium, which is where the torch-lighting ceremony was held. It was free and open to the public, so we went. Amazing stuff. I should put some pictures online or something...
As for the islands, we did the usual: Go to Piraeus (the port), walk into a ticket shop, ask when the next boat was leaving, buy a ticket, and go for the weekend. We saw Aegina with the class; I saw Aegina, Poros, and Hydra with my mom and sister (who came to visit in March); I saw Mykonos and Delos and then Ios and Santorini. They're wonderful places, and I miss them very much.
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