WORLD WIDE LUNCH

It’s two weeks, yesterday, since we left Kalymnos and the tan and, more importantly, the feeling of contentment are already beginning to fade…

But the memories live on and one of them - extremely personal to me, as it happens - is out there for all to see --- on the World Wide Web!

It was Wednesday, 30th August and I came up from a hard day on the beach and ordered a spot of lunch at Artistico...


I decided on a Greek salad, a plate of tzatziki and another of tomato patties and cheese balls. A short while afterwards, a selection of food approximating to my order was brought out on a tray and carried right past me to a table on the other side of the restaurant where it was artfully arranged and then photographed by a young man with a lot of serious camera equipment…

In a London restaurant I would, by now, have been hurtling towards my short-fuse explosive mood, but this is on Kalymnos - in Emporios - at Artistico… With an extreme effort I managed a raised eyebrow and a quizzical look…

Irene Glinatsi hurried over to reassure me: yes, that was, indeed, my lunch she explained, but the young man with the camera furiously clicking away was putting together images for a French web-site on Kalymnos and he wanted a few shots of some typical dishes on the Artistico menu and my lunch, apparently, fitted the bill...

The photographic shoot went on for a few minutes and then the young man relocated and served my food with sufficient aplomb to suggest that, if other work fails, he could reasonably hope to hold down a job in a French restaurant!

He also gave me details of the web site on which my lunch was to make its guest appearance.


Called Kalyrock.com it is primarily intended for rock climbers (not being one myself I’ve never previously mentioned that Kalymnos is, in fact, an ace climbing resort) but which contains many pretty pictures of this lovely island.

Yesterday in London, it being grey and overcast, I found myself missing the sun, sea and sky of our Greek paradise so much that I decided to go to Kalyrock.com and visit my lunch…


Do you know, I could almost taste it…

Then, late last evening, we telephoned Artistico in order to wish Nikola Glinatsi a happy 25th birthday - talking to Nikola and Irene and hearing all the news from Emporios only served to confirm my severe pangs of holiday-home-sickness!

Here's a photo of Nikola having just returned from a fishing trip with a particularly impressive haul of local sea urchins * which reminds me of another of those useful Greek sayings: "If you don’t wet your arse - you won’t eat fish!"



* Sea urchins are a much-prized delicacy, but one which I confess to having passed on once I'd discovered that the spiny outer cases continue moving for a quite some while after the creatures have been cut open and had their insides consumed. Call me old-fashioned, if you will, but being a wishy-washy city-dweller, I'm afraid I tend to prefer food that stays still when it's on the plate!