My Big Fabulous Greek Thanksgiving, With a Bit of Gin, One Raspberry & No Annoying Ellen DeGeneres or Martha Stewart
Close-up on some seasonal indulgence atop Athens' iconic Hotel Grande Bretagne
For all the lunatic celebrities who said they would leave the country if President Trump won the election, here is a memo — take a break from your own misperceptions about America’s new direction. For a one-way ticket to another country may not always be the best recipe.
Oh, Christmas in the Cotswolds can be lovely. So can New Years in the Netherlands. But — Ellen DeGeneres take note — by the time April comes around and it’s still cold and raining in England, sunny California will be beckoning (just ask Sir Paul McCartney).
Thanksgiving, as it happens, is a holiday of ideal duration for a short break from familiar shores, in any year but perhaps especially this one. A week or so away is more than enough for all but the most serially attention-obsessed to recharge and possibly eat some interesting foreign fare in the process.
New Yorkers in particular are spoiled for choice — there are plenty of relatively ways to skip town and head to other locales like Cartagena or Dublin, or even a bit farther like Barcelona, Dublin, or Rome. The Eternal City is Martha Stewart’s choice for her Thanksgiving break this year.
Who can blame her? For many years living in Paris, your correspondent, no great fan of turkey, enjoyed Thanksgiving dinners that consisted of a roast chicken and French onion soup, possibly accompanied by pommes frites, followed by profiteroles with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce for dessert — an excellent alternative to mushy pumpkin pie.
Sometimes great hotels offer special holiday menus so that one can feel like a proper expat for an evening. Athens’ Hotel Grande Bretagne, where I once encountered a memorable potato, is offering a special Thanksgiving menu for the holiday. Its starters include Jerusalem artichoke soup with chestnuts and fresh truffle and spinach salad with roasted pumpkin, goat cheese, wine poached figs, and caramelized pecan.
The main courses on this $147 set menu are either roasted turkey with sprouts from Brussels, oven baked carrots with maple syrup, ginger, and sweet potato purée, or veal tenderloin with sautéed forest mushrooms, shitake aioli, and sauce Périgueux (that involves Madeira wine and truffles), with, for dessert, either pecan tart or apple tarte tatin.
As it happens, exactly none of those fine and mostly familiar items appeal to yours truly, so I decided to try the new bistro menu of the hotel’s iconic rooftop restaurant. It is on the eighth floor, so not too high but there is sufficient altitude for a fine view of the Acropolis. My pre-Thanksgiving repast started, naturally, with “The Last Cocktail,” a somewhat feline concoction with gin, Greek lemon juice, rosemary infusion, prosecco, and pear purée.
Next up was my rendezvous with another potato, and let me just say, sweet potatoes never rank higher than mid. So I was glad to tuck into a plate of chargrilled baby potatoes with beurre noisette and onion powder, hovering over a savory nage of gruyère cheese from the island of Naxos. A hearty autumnal plate, unlike my dining cohort’s pelagic choice of red shrimp ceviche with citrus, tarragon, and fennel.
For entrée, I opted against either a steak or fresh seafood, because holiday season is here and one can truly never have Starbucks Peppermint Mochas or starch. The new menu offers an interesting spin on ravioli, stuffed with celery root and celery crumble, sauced with hazelnut cream and a piquant foam of “kariki” cheese, aged in hollowed out seasonal gourds, from the island of Tinos.
Mediterranean menus tend to go light on dessert, and this one was no exception. My “chocolate flower” was minimal-core to the max but proved to be a worthy accompaniment to a postprandial espresso, itself paired with a duo of mignardises that consisted of a homemade chocolate truffle and tangy lemon macaroon.
What will Ellen and Eva be having for their respective Thanksgiving feasts? Who cares? If they weren’t here, they were just missing out.
