Greek food—both traditional and modern—is one of the hottest trends in American restaurants today. In this workshop, you’ll watch home cooks work with age-old ingredients like filo and capers. You’ll explore Greece’s meze table, and then hear what the country’s cutting-edge chefs are doing with Greek flavors.

Meet Your Guest Chefs

For this whirlwind tour of Greek culinary traditions and some new-wave Greek cuisine, we’re guided by six eminent Greek chefs and food writers. Let’s meet them now:

Nikoleta Foskolou is a cookbook author and home cook. Foskolou has collected and self-published a book of recipes from her native island of Tinos (Cyclades). Determined to preserve traditional cooking, she continues her search for Cycladic recipes for a new book.

Nena Ismirnoglou is chef at Gefsis, one of the most highly regarded modern Greek restaurants in greater Athens. For almost 10 years she was chef-owner of Kallisti, a fine-dining establishment specializing in Greek regional cuisine in Athens. She has also worked at Estiatorio Milos in New York as a sous chef responsible for Greek traditional dishes.

Diane Kochilas is the author of The Glorious Foods of Greece, The Food and Wine of Greece, The Greek Vegetarian, and Meze, Small Plates to Savor and Share from the MediterraneanTable. Kochilas has written about Greek cooking for publications such as the New York Times and Saveur. She also runs a cooking school on the island of Ikaria and is a food columnist for TA NEA, the oldest and largest daily newspaper in Greece.

Aglaia Kremezi, an internationally known expert on Greek cuisine, has written for the Los Angeles Times and Gourmet and is the food columnist for the Sunday Athens Free Press. Kremezi’s books include The Foods of the Greek Islands and The Foods of Greece, which won the IACP’s Julia Child Award for best first cookbook.

Vali Manouilides is a well-known Athenian home cook who regularly teaches cooking in Kifissia, a suburb of Athens. She is active in preserving Kifissia, an area threatened by development, and usually offers her classes to raise money for that cause. Her cooking is an outstanding example of urban Greek cuisine.

Christoforos Peskias is one of the foremost chefs in Athens and among the handful credited with changing the Athenian dining scene in the 1990s. Peskias worked at Balthazar, one of Athens’top restaurants, before leaving to prepare for his upcoming post at a new dining establishment. Peskias has spent time in the kitchen of Spain’s El Bulli and is one of the few Greek chefs to have done extensive stages, including one with Charlie Trotter.

In Greece, capers aren’t just a piquant, salty topping to sprinkle on salads or garnish fish. They are a valued food in their own right, and they often play a substantial role in dishes. After all, Greece was long a poor country and, to many rural Greeks, capers were free, growing wild in the most inhospitable places. Even today, the scraggly shrubs seem to sprout from sun-splashed walls and dry spots in the road, where nothing else will grow.

Caper, Onion, Parsley and Vinegar Spread

Capers are an unopened flower bud. If left on the bush, they open into a glorious pink-tinged blossom. To collect them before they open, harvesters must pass through the same bushes every few days over the many weeks that the bushes are flowering—tedious work. To preserve them for use all winter, the capers can be pickled but are more often sun-dried.

Greek caper cookery reaches its heights in the Cyclades, the cluster of Aegean islands that includes Santorini and Mykonos. On Santorini, cooks top yellow split pea puree with stewed capers. On the Cycladic island of Tinos, they make skordalia—the famous Greek pounded garlic sauce—with whole wheat bread, garlic, almonds, potatoes and lots of capers. On neighboring Sifnos, they stew the capers with olive oil, onions, red wine and wine vinegar and use them as a topping for toasted country bread.

Nikoleta Foskolou, a home cook from Tinos and the author of Traditional Recipes from Tinos, makes two excellent caper dishes that could work as a restaurant meze or appetizer. Her caper and onion fritters, hot from the fryer, would be terrific with a glass of white wine. Take a look at them. Her tangy caper spread (pictured above) is superb on bread. Or thin it with water and use as a sauce for grilled fish, grilled chicken or boiled meats.

Rolled Pumpkin, Leek and Cheese Pie

Spanakopita (spinach pie) and tiropita (cheese pie)—Americans know them well. But Greeks have many more pie recipes using the flaky, crisp dough known as filo.

Greek filo pies can be large or small. They can be made in pans or formed individually. They can be filled with meat or beans; with cabbage, roasted peppers, zucchini or mushrooms; or with a variety of cheeses. Cooks also make sweet filo pies filled with walnuts or dried fruit. Baklava is the best known of these filo dessert pastries, but it is by no means the only one.

“Pies are a dish that evolved out of the needs of itinerant people,” says Diane Kochilas. Shepherds who were constantly moving their flocks could carry these easily transportable pies with them.

As for the dough itself, “there are as many recipes for filo as there are cooks,”says Aglaia Kremezi. “It takes a lot of dexterity. You need to start young to be good. Girls learn at the age of 12 from their mothers, and they do it with an ease you can’t believe.”

That said, some types of filo are easy to reproduce at home, even without a Greek mother. Kremezi particularly likes the filo made by Vali Manouilides, a home cook from Athens. “Vali’s dough is the best,” says Aglaia. “It tastes crisp even the next day.”

Manouilides uses one recipe for hand-rolled filo, a slightly different recipe if she plans to roll the dough in a pasta machine. Soda water makes the dough lighter; vinegar or lemon juice makes it more crisp. The flour should be a high-protein bread flour. The dough has to rest half an hour before rolling, and if you are going to use the pasta machine, make sure the dough is not sticky.

Yes, you can do it.
For guidance, watch Manouilides make,
stretch and fill the dough for
spinach-stuffed filo “snakes.”

Like Spain with its tantalizing tapas, Greece has its own small-plate tradition known as meze (or mezethes, plural). Whenever Greeks gather to share a glass of wine or some anise-scented ouzo, mezethes inevitably follow. The offering may be as simple as a plate of olives and some cubes of feta, but it is socially unacceptable in Greece to drink without eating, so something will always be served.

Barley Rusks with Tomato and Feta

Some of the most familiar Greek dishes in America—taramosalata (carp roe spread), tzatziki (cucumber yogurt dip) and melitzanosalata (eggplant spread)—are part of the meze repertoire. So are the many pies made with filo dough, such as spanakopita. The key to a successful meze assortment is variety—vivid contrasts of texture, taste and color. Crisp radishes, cool greens, creamy yogurt salads, tangy olives and flaky pastries come together on the meze table, encouraging diners to relax, have another glass of wine, take another nibble and keep the conversation going.

Aglaia Kremezi says that mezethes change with the season and the region. In Crete in spring, fresh fava beans still in their pods might simply be dropped on the table as an accompaniment to raki, the strong alcoholic drink.

“You would peel and eat the beans on their own,” says Kremezi. “Barley rusks and the wonderful Cretan cheese are also eaten as meze with olive oil. You might have all kinds of turnovers, but instead of making one large pie as they do in the north of Greece, in Crete they make small pies, called kalitsounia. Depending on the season, they might be stuffed with cheese, or pumpkin, or all kinds of wild greens. Sometimes you might have just olives or roasted chick peas, which are wonderful, or almonds. And there are all kinds of savory cookies made with olive oil and fragrant with aniseed, cumin, saffron or pepper. You find the same ones in the south of Italy; they call them taralli.”

Greek meze for American menus: Diane Kochilas knows what works.

For meze ideas, view the Pylos Restaurant menu.

To accompany meze, Greeks might have wine, beer or one of the following spirits:

Ouzo: a clear distilled spirit made from grape must and flavored with anise, star anise, mastic and other spices. Greeks drink ouzo at room temperature or over ice, often diluted to taste with water, which turns it cloudy.

Raki: similar to ouzo but more fiery, less smooth, and typically flavored only with anise

Cretan Braised Octopus with Fennel, Onions and Orange

The island of Crete, Greece’s largest, lures serious food lovers. Unlike other Greek islands, many of them rocky and arid, Crete is hospitable to agriculture. Fruits and vegetables thrive there, and Cretan produce travels not only to mainland Greece but also to other countries in Europe. The island’s beauty has made it a tourist destination, putting money in local pockets. By Greek standards, Crete is prosperous. By any standard, it has an inviting table.

“Crete has one of the best-defined regional cuisines,” confirms Diane Kochilas. “It’s the one place in Greece where greens are a mainstay. There are 200 to 300 edible greens on the island, and people still forage for them.”

Cretans consume both greens and olive oil “in mind-boggling quantities,” notes Kochilas in her book The Glorious Foods of Greece, which may partly explain the islanders’ legendary longevity. They are resolutely seasonal and simple cooks, mixing and remixing a limited palette of ingredients to create many dishes.

“Building an entire cuisine off a few basic ingredients is at the root of this cooking,” says Kochilas, who likens the repeated themes to a musical fugue. Rabbit might be cooked with beans in winter, with artichokes in spring, and with tomatoes in summer. Snails might substitute for the rabbit on occasion, but the dish would otherwise remain unchanged.

Two other mainstay ingredients contribute to the Cretans’ healthy diet. One is paximathia, the twice-baked barley rusks that Cretans use as toast, as a soup thickener, even as breakfast cereal. “People crumble the biscuits and add hot milk to them,” says Aglaia Kremezi. “To my taste, they’re much better than these modern cereals we buy.”

Another staple Cretan grain is sour cracked wheat (known as xinohondros on Crete, trahana elsewhere in Greece ), an ingredient that arose from necessity. “To prepare for the winter, when they would have neither milk nor grain, people would soak their cracked wheat in sour milk,” says Kremezi. “These lumps were dried in the sun or oven, then ground up coarsely like breadcrumbs and kept in jars or cloth sacks throughout the winter and used in soups, as one would use pasta. Today we make it with yogurt. At Molyvos in New York, where I have worked with the chef, we make trahana at the restaurant. It’s easy now that one can find goat’s and sheep’s milk yogurt.”

Although many Greeks are no longer deeply religious, the Greek way of eating is still shaped by the laws of the Greek Orthodox Church. Because of the religion’s many extended periods of Lent, cooks have had to invent dishes that did not use any animal products such as cheese, butter or milk. The island of Crete, in particular, has some wonderful vegetarian dishes—like young spring artichokes braised with fresh fava beans—because Crete has excellent vegetables.

Artichoke Bean Stew

Spring vegetable stews are flavored with onions, olive oil, lemon juice and dill and may include peas, leeks, artichokes, fava beans, wild fennel and foraged greens. In summer, cooks often begin with a rich tomato sauce, adding green beans, potatoes, bell peppers, zucchini, eggplant or young okra. Seasonings are simple: garlic, salt, pepper, perhaps a pinch of sugar and the juice of a lemon.

Greeks take these vegetarian dishes for granted, says Aglaia Kremezi. They don’t think of them as Lenten dishes, reserved only for Lent. They serve them all the time, perhaps accompanying them with feta cheese if it’s not a Lenten day.

“For us, a stew of green beans and potatoes in tomato sauce is the most delicious dish,” says Kremezi. “So I’m a little amazed when vegetarians try to find meat substitutes. Why do you need a meat substitute?

“We have a dish called briam,” continues Kremezi, “which is all the summer vegetables like zucchini, eggplant and onions, cut up in big chunks and baked with olive oil and garlic and maybe a couple of tomatoes. You bake them until they’re dark and crusty on top, and they get this wonderful sweet flavor. This to me is a heavenly dish. Who needs meat?”

The traditional Greek diet is a healthy diet. Here are a few reasons why.

Cod with Brandade and Almond Foam

“There is now a modern Greek cuisine,” says Kochilas, who has lived in the country for 11 years. “Many chefs have trained abroad and come back to revitalize the cuisine. They are looking to traditional flavors, not to revive those flavors intact but to give them a modern spin or to use traditional techniques in new ways.”

In times past, says Diane Kochilas, Greece was a classless restaurant society. Rich and poor dined in the same places, the simple tavernas serving traditional food. The tavernas remain, of course, but any traveler who seeks to eat only in those honest but unchanging venues is missing out on the excitement of modern Greek food.

Membership in the European Union changed the Greek table, says Kochilas. New foods from elsewhere began to enter the country, arriving not only in restaurant kitchens but in supermarkets. Winemakers became more daring and more aware of international trends. Many young winemakers traveled to France, Germany or California to study. Some have begun working with European varietals, such as Cabernet Sauvignon. Others are applying modern winemaking techniques to the indigenous grape varietals, bringing rapid improvements in quality.

Nena Ismirnoglou and Christoforos Peskias are among the stars of contemporary Greek cooking. Ismirnoglou is chef at Gefsis, one of Athens’ top modern restaurants. Peskias has worked at Athens’ Balthazar and done stages at El Bulli in Spain and Charlie Trotter in Chicago.

Watch Christoforos Peskias deconstruct the classic
Greek stuffed tomato to create an entirely new and memorable dish.

Like American chefs discovering heirloom vegetables, modern Greek chefs are embracing some ancient Greek ingredients that were on the brink of disappearing. In many cases, these foods were associated with the peasant kitchen and scorned by sophisticated diners.

“When I moved to Greece in 1992,” recalls Diane Kochilas, “a lot of these ingredients were unavailable in Athens. If you wanted something from your village, you had to have it sent to you. Now, the peasant cuisine has become almost fashionable.”

A few of the ingredients working their way into the contemporary kitchen:

Dried figs: From the island of Corfu, these figs are harvested, sun-dried, chopped and kneaded with ouzo and pepper, then wrapped in chestnut leaves. Chefs are using them in contemporary fruit desserts as a nod to tradition.

Grape must syrup: Chefs are using this luscious syrup to add a sweet-and-sour flavor to dishes.

Mastic (gum arabic): These resinous crystals from the island of Chios are powdered with flour or sugar and traditionally used to flavor holiday breads. Today’s chefs are using mastic in sauces and savory dishes. It has a musky, incense-like aroma and flavor.

Red mullet roe (bottarga): Young chefs are using this costly salted and dried roe in intriguing ways, sometimes to complement sweet elements such as figs or sweet wine sauces.

Saffron: Many people don’t know that Northern Greece is a saffron producer. Used to flavor coffee, grappa, bread and rusks, it is being rediscovered in the modern Greek kitchen.

Trahana: A pasta-like product made with cracked wheat or flour mixed with buttermilk, milk or yogurt, then dried. Trahana thickens soups, sauces and stews.