Greek Food Today Diane Kochilas shares delicious twists from her kitchen to yours
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t was the spanakopita grilled cheese that got me. There, on TV, was Diane Kochilas, often known as the Greek Food Guru, sandwiching spinach pie filling between two pieces of bread and giving it the American grilled cheese treatment. It was the sort of riff on a classic dish that could have come off as sacrilege, but in her hands—broadcast from her Athens, Greece, kitchen on her own PBS show—it seemed entirely natural, not to mention delicious. For 30 years, Kochilas has built her career on bringing Greek cuisine to the masses, whether it’s through books—18 at last count—or on TV, on her own shows as well as those of stars including Martha Stewart, Bobby Flay and Andrew Zimmern. She has been filing stories on the country’s foodways for major newspapers and magazines for the three decades, and has run the Glorious Greek Cooking School on her ancestral island of Ikaria since 2003. Respected institutions such as the Culinary Institute of America and Harvard have tapped her for her expertise, and so have numerous restaurateurs. She has consulted for Pylos and Molyvos, two of the top Greek restaurants in New York City, as well as Avli in Chicago and Volos in Toronto. She is currently the consulting chef for Committee in Boston. Her latest book, however, is a departure from her usual deep dive into the specifics of a place. Instead, it reflects on what she cooks in her own home. “My Greek Table,” a large, lushly illustrated volume that grew out of her PBS show of the same name, is a fascinating peek into what real Greek cooking is today. It captures the feel of a cuisine that’s alive and vital, as diverse as the people who flow through the country and as sensitive to the politics, economics and time pressures as any. Spanakopita sandwiches instead of a phyllo pie? Heck yes. And with a side of her tahini-avocado dip, please. It took Kochilas a while to get to this point. In part, it’s the double-edged sword of being a foreigner in an adopted land. She is American, the daughter of a Greek immigrant who married a Greek-Italian from Brooklyn and was born in Queens, the largest borough of New York City. “My dad cooked—he worked as a cook in the merchant marine—but he passed
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away when I was a kid,” she tells me from Athens, where she has lived since 1992. While she came to Greek food free from the constraints that tradition and familiarity can enforce, she also had to work hard to discover what the locals know inherently. Her exposure to real Greek food was limited until she was 12. “My mother, in her infinite wisdom, wanted to keep a young teenager off the streets of New York in the 1970s,” Kochilas explains. “She was a working mom then, and what was I to do alone in the summer? So she sent me with my older sister to Greece.” She landed in Ikaria, her father’s homeland, and the connection was instantaneous. “I can’t even begin to describe it,” Kochilas says. “I couldn’t even really speak much Greek. I just remember this feeling of, ‘Wow, this place is really special.’ ” She continued to spend nearly every summer in Greece before heading off to New York University to study journalism. “I’ve always been a writer since I was a little kid,” she reflects. Although she found work as an editor at a
PHOTO THOMAS JASTRAM - ADOBE STOCK
BY TARA Q. THOMAS
