Let's Meat for Breakfast

Mama Leone? Hoffbrauhaus? No, it's Miran.
Kitsch it may be, but they really know their meats.

It's so hot out you can hear it. Athens' legendary summer heat, although windless at ten in the morning, is anything but still: it throbs and pulsates. Of course, there's water everywhere- half frozen bottles with sharp little shards crunching when you squeeze them, cloudy bottles sweaty with condensation, bottles that are still clear because they just got restocked, bottles in everyone's hands. Whatever you gulp down, the dry heat absorbs again right out of your skin. There is none of that isolation of winter: you and the environment are one, and it's heat and water dominating the scene. Yet, at Athinas and Evripidou, it's supposedly all about food: all the produce of the season, all the alluring fish and seafood of the night's boats beckoning from mattresses of ice in their central palace (the soaring cathedral-like central building of the market is so rightly theirs), all the meat (ripe-smelling half carcasses sway gently from hooks in the side market building), salted and canned goods, rices and legumes spilling from bins- everything is here. 

The thing to keep up your strength on this hottest of blinding days is: a) ice cream, b) cappuccino freddo (Greece's new national summer drink, slowly ousting the frappe), c) the glowing, bursting, seasonal ripe fruits spilling out of baskets everywhere you look, or d) cured deli meat. The answer is: d)! cured meat- dense, fatty, salty, glistening cured meats, smoked meats, slices of tongue, peppery salamis, all washed down with hard liquor. Who would have thought?

Our very charming host Yorgos looks out at the blazing pavement.

Then back behind the counter.

I'm strolling down Evripidou passing by Miran, a family run (originally from Armenia, our host tells me) brand of smoked and cured meats available to deli counters everywhere, and this is their showroom- part Hoffbrauhaus, part Mama Leone's- stuff is hanging from the all over the ceiling and out on to the street- dried peppers, braids of garlic, possibly (they look like plaster) fake pastormas and prosciuttos. Gregarious red-aproned men are slicing samples onto wooden boards. It would just be churlish not to dive right in.

A family of tourists is taking up much of the large wooden picnic table in the center of the room. They are gathered around a cutting board of various charcuterie and drinking water from small cups. Nowhere do big groups of tourists serve as a sure guarantee of quality (to say nothing of those Disneyesque ropes of garlic hanging everywhere). But, that was some very nice charcuterie. So we follow suit- the smoked beef “ham,” dense, lean, a peppercorn every now and then, was luscious. And there's tongue- I've never tried tongue! There's no mistaking it- tongue is smoked whole- shaped just as it is in the mouth of the cow- none of that comfortable abstraction that cold-cuts in their uniformity usually provide. We order six slices of each, which are weighed and charged just like a deli purchase, and then a few wedges of an oregano-flecked cheese from Metsovo (a village famous for its smoked hard cheese which comes in large rope-wrapped provolone like lengths), similarly weighed and charged.

The mercilessly unmistakable shape of whole tongue.

Regional cheeses, although not their focus, are represented in abundance.
The shrink-packed rounds n the left are buffalo's milk cheese;
the cheese on the upper right, next to the tupper of dolmadakia,
is the much-loved smoked cheese of Metsovo.

Tongue, being a muscle, would be lean, so I thought. It's not. It's tremendously fatty, and unfortunately looks it. The slices have been folded expertly- the more gross-looking side is happily concealed. The smoked beef “ham” is terrific, and so is the cheese.

The water in tiny cups is of course not water but the beloved tsicoudia- Crete's grappa. It's generously set out on the table with a stack of plastic shot glasses. Tsicoudia is clearly the new espresso- plenty of heat, plenty of verve. I have two, with no ill-effect. It expertly cuts through all that rich, salty meat. Sated, quenched, and fairly entertained (at a supermarket price), I hardly needed an outside endorsement. But a solid one arrives in the form of a pair of local men in their sixties, clearly regulars, They've taken the place of the large family of tourists, and are tucking into a platter nearly twice as large as theirs was, as they banter with the countermen, tsicoudia and opinions alike flowing fast.

It's easy to get caught up in all the lively carnivorous spontaneity:
 it is half gone before I remember to get a picture.
(And frankly, as you see, cold-cuts are not very photogenic anyway....)

Oh, but this is:

Tsicoudia- the new espresso- shimmers like a diamond in the heat.