Greek Keto Cookbook: Table of Contents

Today it’s still being restored, stone by numbered stone, in a project that has now run longer than the original construction. Go at opening time if you can — the marble catches the morning light before the heat and the crowds arrive, and for a few minutes it’s almost possible to see the city the way it looked when this book’s first cooks were lighting their own morning fires below.

The town’s surviving windmills, perched on a hill above the harbor, once ground the island’s wheat; sailors used them as a landmark visible for miles out at sea. Below them, the neighborhood locals call “Little Venice” has houses built right at the water’s edge, their balconies nearly close enough to touch the waves at high tide.

What Mykonos does best, though, is exactly what this chapter is about: turning a table into an event. Tavernas here don’t rush a meal — plates arrive in waves, wine glasses stay full, and a two-hour dinner is considered a short one.

For nearly a thousand years, this was the most consulted oracle in the ancient world. Kings, generals, and ordinary citizens climbed the mountain to ask the Pythia — Apollo’s priestess — for guidance, delivered in trances and famously cryptic riddles that her priests then interpreted. The Temple of Apollo still stands, along with a theater and stadium built into the hillside for the Pythian Games, held every four years in the god’s honor.

There’s something fitting about a chapter of soups and salads opening here. Delphi’s food, then and now, has always been simple mountain fare — olive oil, wild greens, lentils, cheese from local flocks — the kind of eating that doesn’t need to impress anyone, because the setting already has.

Cretans have always cooked over fire, and the island’s mountain villages still center around it — a charcoal grill going in a taverna courtyard, lamb or goat turning slowly, the smell of oregano and rosemary drifting down terraced hillsides toward the sea.

The Cretan diet, built on olive oil, wild greens, and grilled meat, has been studied for decades as one of the healthiest eating patterns on earth, and it isn’t a coincidence — it’s just what happens when you grill everything over real fire and finish it with the best olive oil you can find.

This chapter takes its cue directly from that mountain-village grill: thirteen recipes built for high heat, bold marinades, and a confident hand, because that’s the only way Crete — or the rest of Greece — has ever done it.

At the harbor stands the Portara, a massive marble gate that’s all that remains of a temple to Apollo that was never finished — construction stopped abruptly around 530 BC, likely when the ruler who commissioned it was overthrown. It’s stood alone against the sky ever since, framing sunsets for two and a half thousand years.

It felt right to put a farming island at the front of this chapter. Ladera — vegetables cooked slowly in olive oil until they become something closer to a main course than a side — only works with vegetables grown properly, and Naxos has been growing them properly for a very long time.

For centuries, the only way up was a net and rope hauled by hand, or a series of removable ladders that could be pulled up to seal a monastery off entirely. Of the roughly two dozen monasteries once built here, six remain active today, still home to small communities of monks and nuns who maintain a life of prayer largely unchanged since the buildings went up.

There’s something fitting about pairing this chapter with Meteora. The recipes here — stews braised for hours, a lamb sealed and cooked low and slow for an entire afternoon, a leg of lamb that spends nearly four hours in the oven — share the same unhurried patience the monks who built these monasteries clearly had in abundance.

The famous whitewashed villages of Oia and Fira sit right on that rim, and the sunset views from them are considered among the best on earth — crowds gather along the cliffside every evening just to watch the sun drop into the caldera. Santorini also grows remarkable produce out of that same volcanic soil: cherry tomatoes with an unusually concentrated sweetness, and a small white eggplant found almost nowhere else.

It felt like the right island to close this chapter on. There’s something appropriately indulgent about pairing Greece’s sweets with the single most romantic, most photographed sunset in the entire country.

The Peloponnese carries an outsized share of Greek history for its size: ancient Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games, sits here; so does Mystras, a Byzantine hill town so well preserved that walking it feels like stepping directly into the 14th century; so does Sparta, whose name still means exactly what you think it means.

It felt like the right place to end this book. Every pantry staple in this final chapter — the olive oil, the lemon, the garlic, the herbs — traces back to soil like this: old, well-tended, and quietly responsible for everything that came before it in every other chapter.