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The Summer of My Greek Taverna: A Memoir, by Tom Stone
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The story of a man in love with a place, a woman, and a dream.
Tom Stone went to Greece one summer to write a novel -- and stayed twenty-two years. On Patmos, he fell in love with Danielle, a beautiful French painter. His novel completed and sold, he decided to stay a little longer.
Seven idyllic years later, they left Patmos for Crete. When a Patmian friend Theológos called and offered him a summer partnership in his beach tavérna, The Beautiful Helen, Stone jumped at the chance -- much to the dismay of his wife, who cautioned him not to forget the old adage about Greeks bearing gifts.
Her warning was well-founded: when back on Patmos, Stone quickly discovered that he was no longer a friend or patron but a competitor. He learned hard lessons about the Greeks' skill at bargaining and business while reluctantly coming to the realization that Theológos's offer of a partnership was indeed a Trojan horse.
Featuring Stone's recipes, including his own Chicken Retsina and the ultimate moussaka, The Summer of My Greek Tavérna is as much a love story as it is the grand, humorous, and sometimes bittersweet adventures of an American pursuing his dreams in a foreign land, a modern-day innocent abroad.
- Sales Rank: #180263 in Books
- Published on: 2003-06-06
- Released on: 2003-06-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x .70" w x 5.50" l, .80 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In this feast for all senses, Stone brings readers into the tiny Greek island world of Patmos in a prose that feels as languid as the pace of the Patmian people. At 33, Stone, a Broadway stage manager, puts $10,000 of an inheritance in the stock market and leaves New York for what he intends to be a five-month stay in Greece, where he would fulfill his dream of writing a novel. But five months quickly turns into love, marriage, two children and several years when he meets Danielle, a 23-year-old French painter. After moving to Rethymnon, Stone teaches English as a second language while Danielle continues to paint until an old Patmian friend, Theologos, phones and invites Stone to become his partner for the summer in his beach taverna, The Beautiful Helen. Leaping at the opportunity, Stone, and a very reluctant Danielle, pack up their two children, a Cuisinart and Stone's many recipes, and return to the island where they fell in love and where they would soon learn the hard lessons that come with Greek traditions, bargaining, the ever-present Evil Eye, and their naive trust in Theologos, known to all as O Lados, "the oily one." This nicely told memoir and travelogue is interspersed with Stone's recipes, sensual descriptions of food and place, and the love of his wife and children.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Patmos, the small Greek island where St. John lived and wrote, is the setting of this brief but charming autobiographical travelog with recipes. Stone (Greece: An Illustrated History) is in love with Patmos, most of the people who live there, and especially his French-born wife, Danielle, whom he met and married there. One summer, when asked to take over a friend's restaurant at the height of the summer tourist season, Stone was able to turn his cooking avocation into a real job. In this bittersweet memoir, he recounts the reality of working from early in the morning to late at night, with almost no time for friends and family which ultimately forced him to reconsider the allure of his dream island and start thinking about how to live his life in the future. Stone also relates the seesawing friendship between himself and the taverna owner, an old friend who cheated him of thousands of dollars. Although written in the genre of Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes, this down-to-earth travelog certainly does not present a vacation world viewed through rose-colored glasses. Recommended for larger travel as well as cooking collections. Olga B. Wise, Compaq Computer Corp., Austin, TX
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
When an old acquaintance offers Stone a chance to be part owner and chef of a restaurant on the island of Patmos, he leaps at the opportunity, seeing it as a romantic, profitable summer escape from the drudgery of his teaching job in Crete. Stone turns out to be a success in the kitchen, in part because he supplements the Beautiful Helen's standard Greek menu with diverse dishes, such as Roman spaghetti carbonara and Texan chili. He also becomes infatuated with Patmos' history, famed as the site of St. John's exile and his ecstatic visions of the apocalypse. But what at first seems merely quaint about the natives' ways soon turns sinister as their superstitions become oppressive. Stone's discovery that his Patmian partner has been cheating him out of his share of the restaurant's profits turns the idyllic summer into a nightmare. Despite Stone's deep love for Greek culture and language, he has painted a compelling, but scarcely flattering, portrait of a genuinely insular way of life. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Greek Isle Idyll Goes Wrong but not Sour
By Diana Faillace Von Behren
Like other books of this genre---rich-enough-upper/middle classer eschews conformist corporate lifestyle for simple labor-intensive technologically sparse villa/farm lifestyle in foreign settin---the pure escapist notion of removing oneself from the rat race of traffic jams, cell phones, voice mail and other so-called conveniences of 21st century life somehow acts as a welcome tranquilizer for my overactive and overextended braincells.
Rather than choosing Provence or Tuscany, the author, Tom Stone, decides on the Greek Island of Patmos where John the Evangelist penned his gospel and the feared book of Revelations, as his halycon destination. Tom's reasoning is both nostalgic and capitalistic: it was on Patmos that he met and wooed his wife and wrote his first novel and it is on Patmos that he will accrue enough cash to see himself financially clear for an entire year. All he needs do is rent 'The Beautiful Helen' Taverna for the four hectic months of the summer season, incorporate his multi-national repetoire of delicious menu entrees to the typical Greek fare and through hard work and determination rack in a sizeable fortune.
Unfortunately, Tom overplays his hand with an overindulgence of American optimism. Amidst a silent, embarrassed chorus of less-than-encouraging island characters, Tom learns what the islanders already know: Fresh produce, fine recipes and hard work are not the only ingredients needed in maintaining a successful restaurant,a watchful eye is first and foremost when one is dealing with an unscrupulous partner like the taverna's owner, Theologos.
Soon, Tom's dreamscape of blue water and Greek light are obliviated by the all consuming operation of the taverna. As the Beautiful Helen's popularity increases, Tom's clearly drawn time allocations are blurred into a huge block of toil and varicose veins that barely afford him the time to sleep.
However throughout the Sisyphian tasks of running the taverna, Stone's writing style remains chatty and enthusiastic. Happily, in spite of his bouts with jealous friends, thieving partners, and evil-eye removing witches, Tom remains pleasantly breezy, refusing to let his misjudgement dampen his spirits. Above all, the reader gets the sense that even as he is cast out of his Eden by economic necessity, he is not soured by the presense of the serpent in the garden---his omnipresent need to breath the air of Hellas remains pure and untainted. His exuberance forces us to understand why he undertook the proposition in the first place while his charitable highlighting of the high points of taverna life rather than his humiliations results in a pleasant true-to-life portrayal of the Greek's resolve in business as seasoned by the resource-isolated island life.
One Note: I was saddened that the author's marriage to 'Danielle' ended in divorce no matter how amicable--his love for her was palpable even through the worst of his ordeal.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Good tzadziki recipe
By D. P. Birkett
It's an account of the American author's life after falling in love with Greece and with a French girl. It centers on half a summer attempting to run a taverna on the island of Patmos and getting swindled. It's light-hearted in tone but covers a few tragic events and many that must not have seemed funny at the time. It's short and unpretentious but I enjoyed it more than many heavy works that aspire to tell us significant things about the Greek soul. Many of the things he says about Greeks and how they do business are - well- unfavorable. I kept thinking that if he'd said these things about a more vulnerable ethnic group he'd have been accused of prejudice, but judging from the reviews I've seen so far, Greeks and Greek-Americans don't seem to mind.
The only recipe I've tried was the tzadziki one. It's a great advance on just chopping slices of cucumber into Dannon. I couldn't figure out what he meant by rinsing the grated cucumber. I just rolled it in a paper towel. I got rave reviews although I didn't have white pepper and used black.
17 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Good story, poor editing
By KC
As a Philhellene hungry for true accounts of expat lives in Greece, and an expat myself living in Greece, I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, I struggled many times with its irrelevant details and sometimes boring passages, which caused me to put it down frequently.
Unless you know or like Patmos already, it's difficult to envision some landscapes because either the details provided were too limp or simply tried too hard to paint a picture in my head where my imagination might have done better with fewer but vivid descriptions.
I was also disappointed with simple editing/writing mistakes that Stone and his editor made such as using too many Greek words (spelled phonetically, not true to Greek) and then giving the English translation afterward. A person, like myself and many others, who know both Greek and English can find it annoying to have the same thing repeated twice. It's a beginner's mistake from Strunk and White's rules.
If I could get over the poor editing and lifeless passages, I found a gem of a story that could have shined brilliantly with the right organization, concise adjectives and characters that came more to life. I do admire Thoma for his motivation, intention and courage to make his dreams come true. I do believe he is a good storyteller, as the author says he is in the book. I do believe this could have been a great memoir.
Please don't hate me for writing this review, but I'm being honest by presenting the good and the bad. A better memoir is "The Sailor's Wife" by Helen Benedict or Katherine Kizlos' "The Olive Grove."
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