Restaurant menus now included foods from the villages, such as blackeyed beans or wild greens; ofal, such as beef tongue, oxtail or beef cheeks; foraged foods such as saltwort or sea urchins; traditional dishes such as spinach and rice stew (σπανακόρυζο), oven baked chickpeas (ρεβυθάδα), braised meat with greens and avgolemono sauce (φρικασέ αυγολέμονο) or pastitsio (παστίτσιο) […]. Even trahanas, an ingredient made of fermented milk and wheat, something “never worthy of being served at a dinner party,” as Nagia, an older Athenian told me, was now featured at upscale restaurants.
(2019: 13)
This “gastro-cosmopolitanism”, as Runa Das Chaudhuri names this tendency, reclaims “heritage in a cosmopolitan mode”, packaging the presumably authentic in middle-class artified aesthetics and a neo-ethnic identity (2019: 2). Yiannis Mylonas argues that from a policy perspective this gastronomic tendency is part of a “creativity cult” in Greece promoted by neoliberal actors for defining notions of success in the public space (2020: 102). The peripheral dimension of Greece is also important because as soon as restaurants and cooks attempt to elevate the local and the authentic to the status of high cuisine they have to “look up” to international aesthetics. That way, the local taverna indicates a naval gazing and inward-looking cultural moment that should be repurposed so as to showcase the food revolution’s ideals of cosmopolitanism and sophistication.
The Babushka–Nonna Experience
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