Great Greek grub

Hi Brent

if you're looking for a great Greek restaurant you have got to try Plaka - the food is brilliant, I would even go as far as to say better than most places in Greece! try their flame grilled whole fish - its superb!
Jacqui

Dear Brent

Your article is impressionistic at best. It suffers from several kinds of ignorance: syntactical, lexical, orthographical and cultural.

1. What, pray, is the adverb "leisurely" doing stuck in curiously solitary apposition in your opening sentence?

2. "They don't actually care about the food." How do you know? Did they tell you so? And in the unlikely event that they did, you would have discovered the most counter-culture Greeks in existence. I highly recommend that, for a start, you read David Sutton's book "Remembrance of Repasts", Elia Petridou's essay "The Taste of Home" and anything by Michael Herzfeld so that you can understand how centrally important food is to Greeks.

3. I am trying to be generous in understanding "self-fumigate" as your rather awkward attempt at a clever witticism - fumigate comes from the Latin 'fumus' and 'agere' meaning to make smoke. Hence when Greeks self-fumigate they are making their own smoke -and poisoning themselves. But the problem is that fumigate has a range of other more dominant connotations - disinfecting being chief among them. Are you suggesting that Greeks are so dirty, so rodent-ridden, that they require lethal chemical treatment, that they should be exterminated? You needed to exercise more care when coming up with a way to express your anti-smoking sentiments.

4. From your article, I gather that you have been to Athens (but only to its most touristy areas), the Cyclades (all 220 islands? I suspect Mykonos and Santorini were all you visited. Both, as you yourself admit, firmly on the beaten track of international tourists), and the Ionian islands. And this less than vast or adventurous experience gives you the authority to say that there is no base-line of restaurant quality in Greece? It would have been more accurate to suggest that people avoid overly-touristy spots. Good advice when visiting any country. May I recommend that you actually travel beyond the usual tourist-riddled places.

5. Athena did not strike the Acropolis. I think you will find that it was Poseidon who struck the ground with his trident during a competition with Athena to become the patron deity of Athens. He offered the Athenians water, but it was brackish. Athena offered them the first domesticated olive trees and so won the city.

6. Please note that the ubiquitous salad South Africans call "Greek" is known as a "village salad" in Greece. Thank you for correctly pointing out that it does not contain lettuce. Finally, you got something right.

7. Shockingly, there are Greek wines other than retsina. You will discover this unsettling fact if you venture past the cliches of both South African "Greek" restaurants and the horrible touristy places in Greece itself. Although I am surprised that you did not mention Robola, a tourist favourite on Kefalonia.


8. Please note the correct spelling of Maria Farantouri's name. I regret to inform you that she often sang - and still sings - to the accompaniment of your much despised bouzoukia. Instruments of great importance to Mikis Theodorakis. But bravo for knowing that she exists and is an extraordinary singer.

Thank you Julie. One of the joys of the internet is that as a journalist one gets to interact with one’s readers, and it’s especially valuable when the responses are intelligent.
1. But clearly you have a humour bypass. You also don’t understand the grammatical term apposition. Secondly, I checked my copy; some sub added in that comma, which I agree is a debatable choice.

2. You don’t seem to understand humour. Since you like to quote books at me, let me do the same. If you think I’m being facetious read the London Sunday Times food columnist AA Gill on food in Greece! “Greek food is unremittingly ghastly...best eaten drunk”. Even I took offence.

3. I am certainly not suggesting Greeks are anything like what you (ludicrously) want to suggest. AA Gill does that. And just for the record, Greek friends here in Cape Town thought the article highly enjoyable.

4.Yes, I have been to Athens, Thessaloniki, the islands, on and off the tourist beat – taken there by Greek friends in Greece – and elsewhere – so your guess work about where I have been and what I know is just plain wrong. You then proceed to repeat my own advice?

5. The myth of the olive tree is just that, a myth. I don’t know how to tell you this but it didn’t actually happen. There are various stories. My version comes from an authoritative source, as I am sure does yours.

6. Thank you for agreeing.

7. I know, there are Greek wines other than retsina, but it is uniquely Greek. That was the point.

8. I apologise for the typo on Farantouri’s name. If only the sub had checked that and not added commas! Also, there is no one correct spelling of Farantouri, because it is a transliteration from Greek. I have CDs of her work with her name spelled with a ‘t’ and some with a ‘d’. I have listened to her music for 15 years. I also know Theodorakis and I do not despise the bouzouki (spelt without an ‘a’ at the end in English).
Being a pedant is a dangerous thing. When correcting someone else, you usually make as many mistakes yourself.