My new book, TAVERNA BY THE SEA: ONE GREEK ISLAND SUMMER, based on the time I spent living at lovely Ayios Minas in north Karpathos, is now at the printer, and I’m thrilled about it.
I started writing it
during the winter in Karpathos in 2017 when the memories were still fresh but then
ended up being diverted to focus on the more serious WILD ABANDON: THE DESERTED
PLACES OF THE DODECANESE. I’m very glad I wrote that book, but I’m also happy
that I went back to finish TAVERNA BY THE SEA last year and that Bradt decided
to publish it.
The book shows the
fun side of how I got stuck in rugged north Karpathos for longer than expected,
but it also reveals what summer is like for the locals who work behind the
scenes non-stop, while making it all look easy and relaxed.
When I posted something about it online recently, one of my Facebook friends told me he’d also had a fun summer working at a Greek taverna by the sea years ago, so I decided to interview him about it – and was delighted by his story. Here it is - complete with his pictures from the time!
Jen:
So, hello Paul! You
ran a taverna on the island of Aegina in 1996 – wow, that’s interesting. How did the
opportunity come up?
Paul:
I was working with a friend at a restaurant in
Reigate, Surrey back in 1996 and her parents had received a small inheritance
and decided that they would love to buy a little bar/restaurant in the sun
and have a nice relaxing lifestyle. They had ideas of not doing much work: the
wife would be swanning around with a glass of wine in her hand chatting to
customers while the husband served a couple of beers at the bar to the one or
two old local guys, and they’d spend a day or two at the beach.
The
reality was to be completely different – it was very, very busy! The husband
was stuck in the sweltering kitchen all day while the wife ran herself ragged
around the restaurant. It was not the sort of relaxed retirement dream that
they thought it would be. They ran it for two summers then realised how much
work it was, and decided to rent it out.
Jen:
What
made you take on the challenge?
Paul:
I
find myself to be a rather restless soul and I have always wanted to do
different things and not get bogged down into a routine. I like a challenge and
to push myself out of my comfort zones and this opportunity was definitely
something that was exciting and slightly scary. My mother is Maltese and I
guess I have inherited her love of the Mediterranean sun and sea so as soon as
I heard about the taverna I just knew I had to do it!
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Jen:
So you set off for a
summer on a Greek island.
Paul:
I bought a very cool VW camper van, then got two friends, a chef and a waitress, and we drove down through Europe to Agia Marina on the island of Aegina, to open the taverna and run it for the summer. It was a great road trip.
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Jen:
What was the location like?
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Paul:
The
“Lanterns Taverna” was situated about a five-minute walk outside the main town
of Agia Marina in a place called Alones which was just a sprinkling of houses,
not even big enough to be called a village, nestled in between surrounding low
hills and about 900 meters from the sea. Although it was a quiet area we were
extremely busy throughout the summer mainly with tourists.
Jen:
Did
you speak the language? What kind of food did you serve, and how did you learn how things worked there, where to
order supplies and so on?
Paul:
I
didn’t speak any Greek before I went out so had to learn very quickly. To start
with I managed to get by with lots of gesticulation and a phrase book. By the
end of the summer I found I could converse in Greek – as long as the
conversation was all about catering!
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The
menu was small and mainly Greek but I did try to vary it by doing burgers,
steaks, BLTs and different salads. We also did a Chinese night every Monday
which surprisingly went down very well.
I did have a little bit of help when I got there to learn how things worked. An old Scottish guy who lived on the island and was a friend of the owners met me when I arrived at the taverna with the keys and spent the day telling me where to buy most of the supplies and introduced me to a few of the suppliers. He was quite a bolshy and pushy character and right from the start tried to tell me how to run things and what to do – I guess he saw me as a naive young whippersnapper and maybe wanted to have a say (and some of the profits) in what went on. I “sacked” him after about two weeks.
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Jen:
You said it was a great summer and you totally
fell in love with Greece. If you were working such
long days at the taverna, how did that happen?
Paul:
We
worked all day seven days a week, as I'm sure you'll know. We didn't really
have much money behind us and didn't save anything while we were there – we
just lived off the daily profits paying for our accommodation and spending the
rest on having fun.
We
opened for breakfast, lunch and dinner and didn’t close until the last
customers left – which, as they were on holiday, would normally be about 2 or
3am. After that the staff and I would walk down the hill back to our apartments
– but due to the Greek custom of ‘philoxenia’ we found that we couldn’t simply
walk past the other bars/tavernas without being called in to have a chat and a
drink. It was a great way to meet the locals and make friends – long days, long
nights but great, great fun!
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Philoxenia
was one of the main reasons for falling in love with Greece. I did worry before
I went that the Greeks may not like a foreigner in their midst running a
taverna and that I might be shunned but I found that I was made welcome and
felt relaxed from the first day I arrived. The scenery of low scrubby hills
around me was beautiful, I loved the feeling of the heat all around me and of
course the little bays and beaches with the flawless warm Mediterranean blue
sea.
I closed the taverna at the end of the season and
decided to go home as my job was still available at the restaurant in Reigate. I
do still wonder why I decided to come back to England when I loved Greece so
much. There wasn't much work on the island in the winter but I'm sure if I
spoke to my Greek friends they could have helped me and I could have probably
stayed and started a life in Greece.
Jen:
Thank you, Paul, for sharing a little of your story! Here's to tavernas by the sea...
