The Pebble and the Sea: How the Memory of Santorini Transforms in the Kitchen Lab

How to transfer a living experience into a dish

Many books, hours of filming, and interviews try to describe a cook's experiences and how they affect his cooking. Sometimes with exaggerations, sometimes for commercial reasons, with emotionally charged words or music, tears of joy or nostalgia, they reveal a hidden reality: the need to create new, personal recipes. This is what people in gastronomy call Cuisine d’auteur.

However, a recipe isn't just a set of instructions. At the Philia Winery Kitchen Lab, we don't cook just to feed ourselves. We cook to connect. To transform a basic need into something higher. Not something utilitarian, but a transcendental ritual. Food becomes the catalyst for us to truly know one another, to share our truths around a table. It is an experience that cannot be explained by definitions, but can only be felt when our glasses meet.

The Root: Sunday Before Holy Monday

The base of this recipe comes from an experience repeated every spring in Oia, Santorini, where I spent 12 years cooking and making wine. Every year, on the Sunday before Holy Monday, we collected Avronies (Black Bryony), while others brought eggs or potatoes. Then, we went to the tavern where friends gathered to bid farewell to winter. The cook made us a huge omelet with avronies, plenty of lemon, and mountains of fried potatoes. This delicacy, unknown outside Greece, had a wild and harsh taste that, with wine, united us.

The Transition

Years later, when I owned a restaurant in Paris, I wanted to share this experience. To offer something new in a saturated gastronomic landscape. Early in Paris, I realised the truth of painter Yannis Tsarouchis's words: "Greece abroad loses its shine like a pebble that looks wonderful inside the sea, but once we bring it to the surface, it dries out and dulls."

Serving the omelette exactly as it was in the tavern, under the grey light of Paris, without the saltiness and the friends, would be just a "dry pebble." So, I had to change the recipe. Not to show off knowledge, but to create the "sea" that was missing. I used a technique to bring back the emotion and make the pebble shine again.

Technique transforms Memory to Experience

• The Avronies: Blanched and shocked in ice water to preserve the bright colour and crunch of spring.

  
  

• The Egg: Cooked at 64°C. We achieve a creamy yolk acting as a "sauce" embracing the greens, just as friendship embraced us.

  
  

• The Potato: Confit in olive oil and glazed with smoked dashi, bringing back the taste of the wood oven and the invisible saltiness of the sea.

  
  

• The Energy: A lemon-olive oil-peppermint emulsion to provide energy.

  
  
  
  
  
  

  Closing the Circle at the Kitchen Lab

  Today, at the Philia Winery Kitchen Lab, this dish returns home. To Samos. Now, we don't have to try so hard to create the "sea," because we can see it from the window. When this dish is served with our dry Muscats, magic happens. The wine's minerality cleanses the yolk, and the aromatics meet the peppermint. The pebble is back in the water and it shines.