Going Greek in Alexandria
Alexandria still enjoys a particularly Greek flavour,
writes Dina Ezzat
The façade of the Patisserie Baudrot on Saad Zaghloul
Street in Alexandria is certainly eye-catching. Flanked by shops with unappealing
and overloaded windows offering all manner of goods from women’s veils to kitchenware,
Baudrot’s window does look very Continental—elegant and inviting. It reflects a
nostalgic image of a once-upon-a-time Alexandria where elegant patisseries,
tearooms and restaurants for a wide clientele were found almost on every
street.
“Those were different times. Today we can only have a
glimpse of this past, but it is a glimpse that is certainly worth having,” said
Loukia Georges Dimitri Pyrillis, the owner and manager of the new Baudrot.
Sitting at the entrance to the tearoom, which is still under decoration and
restoration, Pyrillis is charged with ideas that she would love to have
accomplished before 20 February when she plans “a grand reopening of the
Baudrot to mark its 80
th anniversary”.
“I know I cannot bring back the old Baudrot, but then
again I cannot bring back old Alexandria. What I can bring is something to
remind us of the Baudrot and of Alexandria of the past,” she said as she examined
possible decorative items for the tearoom and enjoyed ornamenting a little
Christmas tree for her window shop.
The location of the “new” Baudrot is certainly not that of
the old one. Today’s Baudrot is situated in the premises of the former Petit Trianon—yet
another once-upon-a- time meeting place for the Alexandrians of post-World War
I. A bank now occupies the site of the old Baudrot on Rue Cherif Pasha and Rue
Fouad. Gone is the tearoom/restaurant/bar that was frequented in the early of
the past century by clients such as the famous Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, E
M Forster, author of Alexandria: a History and a Guide, and Laurence Durrell,
who wrote The Alexandria Quartet.
It was an Italian woman who originally started the
business of the Baudrot, and who sold it to a Greek. The Baudrot that Pyrillis
will reopen in a few weeks’ time will not be exactly the same as it once was.
Nor will it be the Petit Trianon of the past. “It will be a tearoom that is
more fitted to the taste and demands of today’s Alexandria’s clients,” Pyrillis
says.
The menu of delicious and rich Greek desserts and starters
that Pyrillis’s father—a third generation Egyptian- Greek who passed away in
the 1960s—offered is simply not possible to re-introduce either, because the
chefs who actually knew the recipes for those desserts are no longer there, and
because it would not exactly be economic to prepare or sell such desserts. Some
of the ingredients would have to be exported to make certain desserts, and that
would make the selling prices a little off-putting for clients, especially for
the uninitiated. “My intention is not to recreate the past at any price. I don’t
want to offer items that will not be inviting. I want people to come and I want
them to keep coming because that is what will keep the Baudrot going,” Pyrillis
says.
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| Athineos |
The Baudrot in Downtown Alexandria is not the only Greek
tearoom that reminds residents and visitors of the city of the cosmopolitan
past of this Mediterranean harbour city. Delices, Athenios, Pastroudis, Elite,
Santa Lucia, Zephyrion and Hamos are some of the remaining Greek traces of 20
th-century
Alexandria. “What we have today is about 60 per cent of what we once had, but
it is still nice and good to have and it is still nice to keep,” says Maria
Vrionidis, an Egyptian-Greek resident of the city. Vrionidis, who is in her
late 40s, has no clear recollection of the time when Greeks were a sizeable
community in Alexandria. However, she does remember times when Greek cafés, groceries
and bakeries abounded. “Those are gone today. True. But we are still here even
in a much smaller community,” she says with an rueful smile. “And of those who went back to Greece many
still come to visit at least once a year. So Greeks and Alexandria are still a bond
to recognize.”
In the book Voices from Cosmopolitan Alexandria published
by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in 2006, Nayla Bassili, an immigrant Alexandrian
Greek who now lives abroad but comes occasionally to visit the city, recalled
her memories of the Bassili house that is now the National Museum of
Alexandria. The Bassili family is originally from the Greek island of Chios.
Her ancestors travelled from Greece, first to Lebanon and then to Egypt, in
about 1900 when her father started to import timber and established the Asaad
Bassili Basha Timber Company that continued until the nationalization years in
the early 1960s when the Bassilis left.
“I was born in Alexandria, in this house which has now
become the National Museum of Alexandria... I can see my grandmother in her bed
in the mornings, when we children ran to embrace her,” Bassili recalled. It is also in Voices from Cosmopolitan Alexandria that
Evangelic Pastroudis, niece of Athanasius Pastroudis, the wealthy owner of the famous
Downtown patisserie that still carries his name even if not his touch and style—and
even when its operation is interrupted at times—recalls the happy days of the
Greeks as well as other “Egyptian, Italian, Armenian and Jewish neighbours” in
Alexandria.
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| Pastroudis |
Pastroudis, who was born in Mex to the West of Alexandria
in 1920, moved to Greece in the late 1950s. Many Greeks and other foreigners
left Egypt en masse in the post-nationalisation years that were initiated in
the late 1950s and early 1960s. As they departed, the once- Alexandrian Greeks sold
properties that included tearooms such as the Grand Trianon in Ramleh Square. The
Grand Trianon is one place where the Egyptian owners have retained its name and
business, and it remains a tearoom/restaurant with carefully preserved
interiors, although with a significantly changed menu. The owners say they try
their best to keep its air and glamour, but at the end of the day it is
impossible to keep a Greek menu of desserts when the Greek chefs are no longer
there. And by all accounts, the Grand Trianon is faring much better than other restaurants,
bars and tearooms that were simply shut down when their owners departed from
the south to the north side of the Mediterranean. “So many things and places
are gone, but some remain, and it is a good thing that they remain, and it is a
good thing that some things are brought back and maybe some more will come back
in the future,” says Alexander Marveilli, or Monsieur Alico as his clients and colleagues
call him. Alico is the food manager of White and Blue, a Greek restaurant
stationed next to the Qait Bey Citadel on the Alexandria Corniche, and Santa
Lucia, an upmarket, once-Greek-now-Greek-plus restaurant on Safiya Zaghloul
Street.
For both Pyrillis and Alico the continuation of some Greek
tearooms and restaurants in Alexandria and the “resurrection” of others is not just
about the splendid food and distinct ambiance they offer for their customers.
It is also, they say, about the fact that Greeks were, and will remain, an
integral part of Alexandria. For some, as Pyrillis and Alico proudly pronounce,
Alexandria “is home”. Both, like other Egyptian- Greeks, take pride in being
born and brought up in Alexandria. They both attended the Greek school in the
city, married fellow Egyptian- Greeks and brought up their children in Alexandria.
And even when the children are gone they remain in this city that was the
capital of the imagination for Cavafy and offered a setting for many of his
poems.
Indeed, as many books written on Alexandria remind the
reader, it was Cavafy who used to say: “Mohamed Ali Square is my aunt, Rue
Cherif Pasha is my first cousin and the Rue Ramleh is my second. How can I leave
them?” And it was also Cavafy who celebrated the diversity of Alexandria when
he wrote, “We are a mixture here... Syrians, immigrant Greeks [and] Armenians.”
It was during the Mohamed Ali years that Greeks and other
foreigners, especially Italians and French, came to Egypt. And in the early
years of World War I they came again, especially to Alexandria, escaping Ottoman
domination. In the second half of the 1800s, Greeks built their school,
hospital and other community facilities. As recently as the 1950s some 100,000 -- some suggest even
150,000 -- Greeks called Alexandria home. During the first half of the century,
Greeks were estimated to have constituted more than 25 per cent of the
ever-so-diversified foreign community of the city that harboured more than half
of all the foreign community in Egypt—which totaled 200,000. During these
decades, they dominated the grocery trade, patisseries, food processing and
manufacturing of soft drinks and spirits.
Today there are a few hundred Greeks who still inhabit the
Quartier Grec at the heart of Alexandria, attend the Greek school, socialize at
the Greek Club and Greek tearooms and dine at Greek restaurants. “We still live
and work here as our parents and grandparents did,” Vrionidis said.
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| Stella Beer |
Vrionidis categorically denies that Greeks in today’s
Alexandria are isolated from the rest of the city’s population. Integrated as
ever, she said, Greeks are. She is a clear example of continued integration.
Her Egyptian friends meet up with her. They drive together, plan holidays and
outings and indeed “exchange recipes for Greek and Egyptian dishes”. Together,
she says, they dine at “Egyptian as much as at Greek restaurants”. Together,
Egyptian and Greek—or, as Vrionidis and Pyrillis would insist, Egyptian-Greek friends
flock to (Egyptian) Kadoura as much as they do to (Greek) Zephyrion. And, says
Vrionidis, “the dishes are still as good and enticing as they always were.” At
White and Blue in Ras Al-Tin, or at Zephyrion at the other end of Alexandria
Corniche in Abu Qir, Alico and Nicolas Tsapzis Pericilis are still serving the
tarama—fish roe whisked with olive oil, tzatziki—a yoghurt and garlic paste,
kolokythokeftedes—fried courgette and cheese balls, and mousaka—the famous
aubergine and minced meat dish. Along with these very Greek specialties come
the tasty grilled fish, shrimps and calamari that taste so different when served
at Zephyrion than at any other typical fish restaurant in Alexandria, like the
ever-so- famous Abu Ashraf. “It is all about the way we prepare the fish. The
Egyptian way is certainly tasty but the Greek way is evidently different,” says
Pericilis, the owner of Zephyrion. And it is for this specific taste that the
clients of Zephyrion take a very long and not necessarily very pleasant drive
to reach the restaurant that has been stationed on the beach at Mex since 1929.
“My father built this restaurant when Abu Qir was practically an undeveloped
part of Alexandria. He built not far from a British army camp to secure a
stable flow of clients. He called it Casino Zephyrion because it was very
fashionable at the time to call a restaurant ‘casino’,” Pericilis says. The
founder of Zephyrion, according to his son, used to bring potable and washing
water from Montazeh, since water was not available at the time in Abu Qir. He aimed
for no exotic cuisine. He just offered the grilled fish and shrimps. “[Zephyrion]
was one of the very first [restaurants] that served grilled shrimps in Egypt,”
Pericilis said.
Today, Zephyrion still sticks to the simplicity of the
basics—the good basics. The simple interiors of such restaurants, according to one
well- travelled client, “are typical of Mediterranean restaurants, especially
those in some Greek islands.” The menu is also very basic. “It is just fish,
shrimps and wine or beer. Nothing has changed. For the past 80 years Zephyrion
has been serving the same menu and it has been a celebrated one,” Pericilis
said. And judging by the wide selection of photographs that adorn the interior,
and the faces, languages and accents of the clients enjoying the food that it
offers, Zephyrion is as popular among all types of Alexandrian's as it is among many of its visitors,
dignitaries certainly included. “Yes. We have clients from all over Alexandria and
from all over the world. Zephyrion received two tourism awards from the
Egyptian government [in the 1990s],” Pericilis says with unmasked pride.
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| Trianon |
Pericilis arrived in Alexandria in 1962 from Athens. “I
was in Greece studying to be a medical doctor, but I had to come here when my father
was dying. The restaurant became my responsibility, and it is a responsibility
that I have happily been honouring ever since and intend to continue to hold
until the day I die,” he says. Pericilis is indeed well liked by his Egyptian
customers. One came with her grandmother to invite him to her wedding and to
ask him to prepare for a large lunch once she was back from her honeymoon. “She
shared her plans with the owner of Zephyrion,” he said proudly. It is people
like Pericilis whom many Alexandrians see as a reminder of the years of the
city’s cosmopolitanism, when Alexandria was “five races, five languages, a
dozen creeds” as Durrell wrote in Justine.
“We are trying very hard to keep this air of
cosmopolitanism,” says Tamer Sherin, general manager of a set of mostly Greek
restaurants including White and Blue and Santa Lucia. Sherin says that while
the Greek, and for that matter the Italian, chefs are gone, he invites them to “come
visit and train our Egyptian chefs”. The outcome is indeed impressive. The
dishes served at his restaurants are as good as those served in restaurants in
Athens.
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| Elite |
Sherin is planning to expand business. “There is this
nostalgia for things of the past that seems to be growing. There is this
growing demand for Greek restaurants,” he says. “We are not bringing back cosmopolitan
Alexandria but we are keeping the traces,” he adds. In the book Voices from
Cosmopolitan Alexandria, Khodary Gasser Hassabo, a waiter at the Elite
Restaurant and Café, recalls with much fondness the times of the past when
Madame Christina would oversee the chefs as they prepared “30 or 40 turkeys”
that were sent to be baked at the huge oven at Pastroudis to be served for
clients on New Year’s Eve, when they celebrated from the early hours of the
evening of 31 December to the early hours of 1 January. “It used to be a huge celebration
at the Elite,” Hassabo recalled. Today only one turkey is prepared for the
clients of the Elite, which has closed its upper room and is being run by
Madame Christina’s son who lives in France and comes only to follow up on the
business, according to one waiter.
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| Santa Lucia |
Images of the bygone days of Alexandria are
portrayed at length in the literature of novelists such as Edward Khayyat,
Gamil Ibrahim Attiyah and Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid. The Greek characters and places
are not missing there. But Alexandria of the past is to be no more, as the late
film director Youssef Chahine—born in Alexandria in 1926 once said of the city
that he celebrated in his films. For Chahine it is the Alexandria of the
present and future that should be celebrated and beautified. The Alexandria of
the present, however, will always carry a strong flavour of the city of the
past. And Greek cafés, restaurants and indeed the few left of the Greek
community will always stand testament to that.
AN ARTICLE BY DINA EZZAT IN THE AL-AHRAM NEWSPAPER (2008)
Pictures and formating (Mike Sharobim)
This is
the colourful setting of Alexandria’s most famous quail restaurant. Originally
owned by the Lebanese Elias, it took its name from its location. The tiny
square which is a cloth and bales market by day, known as El Biyassa (from the
Italian piazza, or square), is transformed by night into a grill, which offers quails,
beqfiquoes and pigeons to people from all walks of life. 
