The Summer of My Greek Taverna

The humorous and sometimes bittersweet story of a man in love with a place, a woman and a dream - part memoir, part travelogue with recipes - for fans of Frances Mayes and Peter Mayle.

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The place was Patmos, the tiny Greek island where St.John received the apocalyptic vision recorded in the Book of Revelations and Tom Stone wrote his first novel. The woman was a French painter, his wife, Danielle. The dream was to return there for one last summer with Danielle and their two young children. A telephone call from a Patmian friend, Theologos, offered Stone the opportunity to go into partnership in his restaurant, a beach taverna named The Beautiful Helen. He jumped at the chance, much to the dismay of his wife, who wisely believed in the old adage about not trusting Greeks bearing gifts. No longer a tourist, Stone quickly learned hard lessons about Greek skills at bargaining and their use of the Evil Eye. Not only did he struggle to run a restaurant that closed at three a.m. and opened for fishermen at seven, he was also forced to come to the painful realisation that Theologos was cheating him out of thousands of dollars. Yet there were many joys: the beauty of the island, the friendships with both the natives and foreigners he had come to know over the years, the yachts that arrived from Mykonos for dinner and the support of his family.