If someone says Greek food and the first thing that comes to mind is a gyros, you are not wrong, but you are also only seeing a small corner of a much bigger picture. Gyros, the meat carved off a spit and wrapped in pitta, is genuinely Greek and genuinely good when done properly. But it is street food, the equivalent of judging Italian cooking entirely on a slice of pizza from a takeaway counter. It tells you something true about Greek food, that it is built to be eaten quick

I did not grow up eating Greek food. I grew up in Zurich, in a household where the cooking was good but Swiss and Central European in its character: hearty, precise, built around the kind of ingredients that suit a landlocked country with cold winters. Mediterranean cooking was something I encountered on holidays, in restaurants, at other people's tables. It was always appealing but it felt like it belonged to somewhere else. Then I moved to Edinburgh, met Panos and Margarita

Greek food has a reputation problem in the UK, and the problem is familiarity. Most people have a fixed image of what Greek food is. A gyros from a late-night takeaway. A Greek salad with a block of feta. Hummus from a supermarket shelf. Maybe a taverna meal from a holiday in Rhodes fifteen years ago, where the view was better than the octopus and the house wine arrived in a carafe without a label. None of those things are wrong. Some of them are genuinely good. But they repr