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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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)