“So what is it you do, Hapworth?” Dick asked.
“I’m a conceptualist,” I said. My voice was so uncertain that I had to clear my throat and repeat myself, in case I’d only imagined having spoken the first time.
Dick brusquely interrogated, “What does that mean?”
“I invent restaurant concepts.”
Izzy interjected, “Give him an example.”
The first thing that came into my head: “Life’s the Wurst. It would be a gourmet hot dog stand and therapeutic facility.”
Izzy revised aloud. “In a clinic. Like an upscale mental hospital snack bar.”
I looked at her. “Hey, that’s good,” I said. I scanned the end tables for a pen. Sadly, I couldn’t find one.
The others smiled and nodded perfunctory measures of approbation, but Dick refused to yield and play along. “And you make money on that?”
“No,” I said. The small voice had returned. “Not yet.”
“So, what’s the point?”
I held an imaginary object between my hands—an old classroom lecture idiosyncrasy—as I tried to construct a sentence in my head. “I guess that fine dining is too serious, and that it should be about fun?”
“How is eating in a hospital fun? Or fine, for that matter?”
“Maybe that was a bad example.”
“I like it,” Maddie said.
We moved along Monastiriou into Thessaloniki. Sidewalk kiosks were jammed with cigarettes and tourist trinkets, newspapers and magazines, and, of course, beer and wine options. This was Europe, after all. We peered into the windows of bars and beach clothing shops and strip clubs. George narrated, mainly to Dick and Maddie, the significant historical, architectural, and cultural details. He was a walking Fodor’s guide of our route. He pointed out the new subway stop. The line had been built for the Athens Olympics four years ago, and construction to extend all the way to Thessaloniki was still taking place. At every intersection, bags and bags of garbage were piled up. The bags surrounded light poles and completely blocked the flow of sidewalk traffic in places.
“There’s a strike,” George said.
“How long has it been going on?” Dick asked.
“Almost a month now.”
“Jeesh.”
The restaurant was by the water. We entered through a path in the deck seating, which was empty, save for a few occupied tables. The dining room was completely vacant. The locals ate after nine o’clock, George told us. We’d have the place mostly to ourselves for a couple of hours. The host led us up some stairs to a table in a semi-enclosed space where two men and a woman sat. They greeted George in Greek. He introduced Constantine, the Boutari winery president, and his nephew, Stellios, the sales manager, to the rest of us. Between the two was Constantine’s wife, Nikki, a genial woman with a broad smile and a mane of wavy blonde hair.
The Greeks had ordered the meal before menus even reached the table. Shortly, waiters brought bottles of wine Stellios selected. The first served were regional light whites. Moschofilero was very similar in style to Sauvignon Blanc. Malagousia reminded Izzy of white Grenache. As we swirled and tasted, mezedes, small canapé portions, began to come. There were baskets of grilled black and sesame breads, onto which we spooned taramosalata, a pink-colored spread made of fish roe. I liked it right away. Another spread, tsatsiki, was flavored with garlic. Everything was flavored with garlic. A vegetable plate of spinach, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, slices of ginger-glazed carrots, and olive oil followed. I wanted to go slowly, pace myself, but Izzy kept feeding me. She’d take a round piece of bread, paint on a bit of taramosalata, have a bite, and pass the rest to me, almost unconsciously.
Then the heavier courses began to tumble out. There was a deep-fried fish, which we had whole, head, tail, and all. There was very tender octopus. Snails came in tomato sauce. I selected two small lamb chops from a platter. I tried to eat them with a fork and knife out of politeness. Doing so was impossible, given their size. I abandoned the silver when I saw the others using their hands. I attempted to skip the sausage and tomato when it came around, but the waiter insisted I try some. I forked up a portion. Then there was more lamb, this time in the form of grilled nuggets in a cream sauce. This was called souvlaki and served on very thin pita bread. With these dishes we had a local red, Xinomavro—“Casino-mavro,” Dick said to his glass, which he held by the bowl.
By dessert, I was full and ready to go back to the room and pass out. I was aware my trip’s host and my surrogate guides from Boutari were watching me, and I didn’t want them to think I wasn’t having a good time (or tired), so I ate a slice of chocolate mousse cake. I also had several bites of halvah, the crumbly cashew pastry. In the States it was often found in dry and terrible versions, so I always avoided it in Greek restaurants back in Chicago. Here, halvah was quite desirable indeed.
The Greeks had abstained from smoking the entire meal, out of deference to our allergenic American temperament. Now they could no longer contain themselves. “Does anybody mind?” Constantine asked. Nobody objected.
Izzy caught me longingly eying their Marlboro Lights box. “When in Rome?” I said.
“You’re not in Rome. You’re in Greece.” She took my hand under the table. “Happy birthday, Hapworth,” she whispered.
I looked at my watch. “I don’t even know if it still is. I like that I got to lose most of it in the time change.”
“What do you think of the pairings?”
“Everything tastes so good. It’s like the food invented the wine, or the wine invented the food, you know?”
She looked pleased. “There’s a reason for that. What grows together goes together.”
Izzy released my hand when Dick poked her shoulder. He wanted to show her an old wine bottle he’d pried from a display of plates and other decorative artifacts on the wooden shelves behind us. She laughed generously. I could tell she was uncomfortable with our new franchiser friend’s third-grader propriety.
“What do you think of the wine, Dick?” Izzy asked.
He returned the bottle he’d taken to its shelf. He offered Izzy his empty palms. “It’s good, I guess, I mean . . . You’re the expert. You tell me.”
“Well, do you like the ones we’ve drunk so far? Do you like how they taste?”
“Sure,” Dick said. He crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t know if that means they’re good or not. I know retailing. I know how to set up a business. I don’t know the first thing about wine.”
“You know what you like, right?” I asked. Dick exhaled through a partially closed mouth, flapping his lips. “So, you know the first thing.”
Dick looked at Izzy.
“He’s absolutely right.”
Dick and Maddie let the Boutari people take them back to the hotel after dinner. Izzy, George, and I walked in the opposite direction. We went to an outdoor bar that overlooked the beach. Even though the space was small and crowded, the scene was still quaint, charming. The music was loud and the air saturated with smoke, but it wasn’t unpleasant. George got us a round of ouzo shots. The small glasses of Greece’s most famous anise-flavored liqueur arrived along with a bowl of almonds and tray of olives. “We didn’t order this,” I said. The waiter didn’t speak any English, but he seemed to sense something was awry. George shook his head at the waiter to signal that everything was fine. “That’s how they serve drinks in Greece,” he told me.
We listened to the soundtrack—“All Out of Love,” “Get the Party Started,” “Show Me Love”—for a while because it was too noisy to talk. I was exhausted but tried mightily to stay awake. It was after eleven. I’d probably only had three hours of sleep in the previous twenty-four. And I was thirty-eight now, so, by default, elderly.
Saturday, March 22
Thessaloniki
Izzy and I had passed out promptly upon returning to our room. We wer
e a heap of limbs on a flat, unforgiving surface. I got up a few times during the night to piss and to drink handfuls of warm water from the bathroom faucet.
I stood and went to the phone when our wake-up rang. “Kalimera!” intoned a discrepantly fervent desk clerk. I thanked her and returned to bed and dozed off. It wasn’t until George called, concerned we hadn’t made it to breakfast, that we wrenched out from under the sheets. Despite my redoubtable engorgement last night, I was starving. We got dressed in a panic and raced downstairs.
George was waiting for us with the others in the lobby. His black hair looked even darker from post-shower wetness. He handed out bottles of water and led us to the tour bus. It was a sixteen-seat Mercedes Sprinter. Dick and Maddie were already on board. They sat together in the back. Izzy, in her sunglasses, took a row toward the front for us, on the driver’s side. The driver, a taciturn Albanian who wore a coat and tie, had a long name only George knew and could pronounce. Izzy and I privately decided we’d call him Mike, after a waiter at Bistro Dominique with whom he shared a resemblance. Mike took off the parking brake, depressed the clutch, and put us in gear. The Sprinter stuttered under the weight of the passengers. As we pulled away from the curb, it began to gather momentum.
We were headed to Drama, in Macedonia. On the way out of Thessaloniki, we passed tenement apartment building after building. Laundry hung drying on their terraces. Boys who didn’t seem to have jobs or school smoked sullenly on corners. Then we were on a highway, bordered by green. Twingoes and Honda Civics and motorcycles sped along with us. There were olive groves that looked like apple orchards. A body of water shimmered beneath the hills of Mount Falakro. If winter had been here recently, there was no sign of it having ever shouldered in. Izzy had her head on the window, her eyes shut. Dick also ignored the scenery. He prattled on about retailing without let.
I started to zone out. The highway landscape was meditative. Restaurant concepts began to take shape in the cognitive twilight of my receding consciousness, the vicinity of the most vividly imagined scenes. The sound of Izzy’s voice soon returned me to the present. “I was thinking about what you said last night.”
I searched my mind for an apparent referent, but came up with nothing. “What did I say?”
She looked annoyed that I didn’t recall instantly. “Your restaurant philosophy. It’s like my wine philosophy.”
I waited for her to continue.
“How, like, you don’t want fine dining to be so stuffy, so serious. How your concepts make it easy and accessible. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do with wine. Arm people with information, but not the kind of information that makes them irritating and snobbish. Just well prepared. Prepared so they don’t have to feel intimidated. So they have fun. I think we’re trying to accomplish the same thing, just you’re doing it with restaurants, and I’m doing it with wine. Don’t you think?”
I didn’t know what to say. I reached for her hand. I laced my fingers between hers and left them there like that, atop her thigh.
Ktima Pavlidis, the winery, was the only building on the sprawl of green grass that fronted the acres and acres of vines. It looked like a giant marble mausoleum. Inside the building, we saw the Pavlidis stainless steel fermentation tanks and walked the long bottling line, which was not currently in service. There was a room where hundreds of full bottles yet to be labeled were hanging out in open-faced crates. Then we were taken downstairs.
Here was the tasting room, in the center of two dark, cool cellars in which wine fermented and aged in barrels. The tasting room had an oil painting of a ravishing fire on a large, rectangular canvas on the back wall. They’d set a sleek mahogany table with benches on either side of it for us. There was a white and a red glass for each person. In the middle sat a silver spit bucket. Pavlidis had eight wines for us to taste: Tempranillo; Assyrtiko, the grape we learned about at last night’s dinner; three versions of a product called Thema: the white a blend of Assyrtiko and Sauvignon Blanc, a rosé made entirely out of Tempranillo, and a red composed of Syrah and Agiorgitiko; and three non-trade samples that had been taken out of their barrels within the past four weeks and hadn’t yet been tried outside of the winery.
I began with the first wine. I hefted my glass by its stem and spiraled the juice inside. Across the table, Dick and Maddie took their glasses by the bowls. This was a faux pas, the mark of amateurs. But swirling was as far as my impersonation of a wine-industry insider would go. Even though Izzy and George tasted and expectorated into the inelegant reservoir without a second thought, I decided, defiantly, that I was not going to make use of the spit bucket. The wine was too good to waste. How much bad could come from swallowing a few sips of each varietal? As I progressed, I caught myself draining the glasses. The sample pours were pours, quite the opposite of those you’d find at a walk-around tasting for consumers, where you’d receive thimbles. In short order, I got quite unmistakably tanked.
My head was a tumult of waves. When spanakopita, a flaky layered phyllo pie filled with feta cheese and spinach, came out for lunch, I gobbled several triangles, but it was too late to counteract the gallon of wine I’d drunk. The cheese was acidic and scorched my throat. I hoped Izzy couldn’t tell I was wasted. She was reviewing some notes she’d jotted on the Assyrtiko (“Nervous,” “Clean and citrusy,” “Goes well with ceviche”). I was glad she didn’t look up at me when I excused myself. I climbed a cement staircase and found the men’s room. There I puked in a toilet. It managed to restore me. After I rinsed my mouth out with water from the faucet, I returned to the group. I was able to stay composed for the remainder of our visit by keeping my eyes averted from the glasses and the remains of the tasting. I feared reacquainting myself with the instruments of my momentary demise would unsettle my stomach’s now-precarious equilibrium. While the others engaged the remaining bottles, I drank water I poured myself from a pitcher that somebody had brought out while I was away.
On the bus, I sweated and slept off the rest of my stupor. We arrived two hours later at our next stop, Nico Lazaridi. Here we’d have another tasting, followed by dinner at the winery. How did people survive this pace? I supposed I was ready to go at it again. Maybe this time I’d go at it a little more cautiously.
Lazaridi was more rustic in comparison to Pavlidis Estate. Here the grass was a little wild, overgrown. A goat roamed around, chewing uncertain comestibles. The tour revealed that the facilities, too, were decidedly less pristine. The tanks were dinged up. Their double convex exteriors were pitted and not as shiny as the ones we’d seen earlier. I could tell the grimy floors had been hastily hosed prior to our arrival. We went below ground to see the caves in which the château’s sparkling wines were fermented. The walls were craggy with ancient, mineral-rich golden soil. It was as though they offered a rare glimpse at layers deep into the earth. Upstairs, the tasting room wasn’t fancy. In fact, it wasn’t really even a tasting room at all. The staff set up guests in a winery conference room with seats that had side panels you could swing up for a writing surface, like those classroom chairs many rooms on campus had been outfitted with and I’d sometimes encountered in my previous life.
In this configuration, it was very difficult to balance one glass while trying to taste the wine in the other. My desktop seemed to be the only one that slanted. We tried a blend of white Monemvasia and red Mandilaria grapes that created a Bordeaux-style dry rose. A sweet white the color of amber sunshine made from the Muscat grape was called Moushk. Perpetuus, a local Dramatic blend of Sangiovese and Cabernet Sauvignon, was much juicier than the comparable lighter varietals we’d had so far. The tasting dwelled on a heavy red called Magic Mountain. It was a mélange of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot.
“That’s funny,” I said, mostly to myself.
“Why’s that?” Dick replied. His big hand seemed to grip his desk more tightly.
“There’s this Thomas Mann novel, called The Magic Mountain. It�
�s about a guy who admits himself to a TB facility in the Swiss Alps.”
“TB is funny?”
“Well, no, but to name a wine . . .” When Dick countered with stony inexpressiveness, I added, “Well, if all else fails, I guess it could be a popular by-the-glass placement at sanitariums?” I evoked a broad smile, which went unreciprocated. “Amusement parks?”
Dick exhaled an audible stream. He directed his attention to the ebb and flow of the Moushk tide in his glass. Here his eyes remained, until someone else stepped in with a remark that more closely resembled insight.
After the tasting, we were led to the winery’s art gallery. In the center of the room, a round dinner table had been set for us. Servers began to open lids on chafing dishes lined up on a long cloth-covered folding table adjacent.
Izzy fashioned a tasting menu for me from the buffet. She ladled onto my plate large lima beans in tomato sauce, a heap of stewed greens, and a square of a casserole that looked like macaroni and cheese with a spanakopita topping, pastitsio. On the table awaiting us were the open wines that we’d sampled during the tasting. In between us sat the winemaker and the enologist and the marketer with their modest portions. Dick schemed the pyramid of Corked4Less, Maddie and Barry brought out pictures of their children, and Izzy talked about running a fine dining establishment and her work on television. As I ate greens and drank rosé, I admired the art around us. The giant oils depicted their scenes in broad strokes. Operatic sailors stood on a thrust stage. A fire raged at a horizon, with geometric structures of pink and blue in the foreground, lots of moons, blazing suns.
At a lull in the conversation, Nico Laziridis, imaginably in an attempt to jump-start things, turned to Izzy and said, “Sooo, Osama? Or Heellary?”
Sunday, March 23
Naoussa
Vintage Attraction Page 23