THE NANJINGER | VOLUME 13 ISSUE 01 | OCTOBER 2022
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GASTRONOMY By Frank Hossack
Finally, a Mediterranean Heaven Lands in Nanjing
S
ome of our more talented-in-the-kitchen readers may recall being told they should perhaps think about opening a restaurant. Dinner table banter maybe, but get told it enough and the very few will inevitably entertain the proposition with some seriousness.
They’re taken with the food for sure, but also the decor (a bit overboard with the blue and white perhaps, but Chinese do like a fully-immersive experience) and the story of Vanessa Yiannikouros. Greek, obviously, Yiannikouros is all about connecting people with her home country, through food. We have her mother to thank for that, in the dishes Yiannikouros learned to cook from recipes handed down through the family for generations. Upon stepping into seemingly-small Santorini, the first order of business is to transport oneself, Tardis fashion, upstairs, where ample seating is to be found for the non waifs among us. There, each table is stocked with salt, a black pepper grinder, extra-virgin olive oil and, in presumably-true Greek fashion, paprika. It’s a nice touch, and one that immediately hints at we are indeed about to experience the real thing.
Such a scenario sets the scene for Santorini, a new haven of Greek delight which has had Nanjing’s international community hyping the heck out of it. But is that deserved? Sitting across the road from Nanjing International School in the bazaar of fried-chicken joints, nail centres and tyre-kicking hairdressers, Santorini has quickly become a firm favourite with teachers and staff with the aforementioned.
Those boxes ticked, approach the menu. And at this point, The Nanjinger wishes to emphasise that we were on this day a sizeable group; five in fact, and that generally, gluttony is not our thing.
