Nydri - Monday, September 29
The morning dawned clear and bright, and we could finally see what Lefkada is all about: sea and sky and islands!
We spent a long and lazy morning drinking coffee in the sunny dining room.
Ryan started hatching plans to drive out to Porto Katsiki, allegedly the most beautiful beach in the world, but as the morning wore on and turned into afternoon, these plans were revised to simply getting lunch in Nydri.
Nydri is a resort town on the east coast of Lefkada. In the summer, it’s awash in tourists, but by this time of year, it’s quiet and all the tourist operations are winding down.
Tourist Nydri seems to consist of two main streets: the street along the waterfront, lined with giant tour boats and touts trying to entice tourists to join their outings, and the high street one block away, lined with tourist souvenir shops and vehicle rental joints. This high street looks like it should be pedestrian-only, but apparently cars can drive down it too. (At least, we drove down it…. Perhaps this is impossible in high season.)
We ate lunch at The Barrel, a restaurant our manager Helen recommended. It was some of the best Greek restaurant food I’ve ever had; even the moussaka was light and delicately flavored.
Nydri is a great place to buy tourist schlock and join boat tours. It’s not so great for grocery shopping. For that, you need to drive to Lefkada town. After our lunch outing, Ryan, Chris, and I drove back there to get supplies for the night’s dinner.
First, we strolled through downtown to see the sights and to find Ciao gelateria, a family-run joint that allegedly sells the best ice cream in Lefkada, if not the entire world. Alas, the place was closed, and not just for the day, but evidently for the season, if the paper taped to the exterior windows was any indication.
Indeed, the whole town appeared dead. It looked like the entire tourist-facing population had packed up and left for the winter.
We ended up getting ice cream at Gelatopolis Stavrakas near the harbor. It was okay but a bit cloyingly sweet. They had kaimaki ice cream, a Greek speciality that includes mastic from Chios and salep, a powder made from orchids that provides a gummy, chewy texture.
For groceries today, we tried out the AB Vassilopoulos, with the tagline “Kai tou poulou to gala!” This line means “and bird milk!” Apparently it’s a traditional phrase used to refer to the most extra, suggesting that the store stocks absolutely everything you could think of and many things you can’t. Evidently the correct term used to refer to this chain is “Alpha Beta,” which we probably could’ve figured out if we’d given it any thought.
It’s an excellent store! The enthusiastic and engaging butcher willingly spent several minutes discussing dinner possibilities with me and Ryan. The star of our dinner purchases that evening was sheftalia, a lamb and pork meatball wrapped in caul fat. When grilled over charcoal, this spiderweb of fat melts (and bursts into flame), flavoring the meat with unctuousness.
Unfortunately, AB is too fancy to carry such declassé items as clay pot yogurt or local wine in plastic liter bottles. We had to make do with fancy wine in glass bottles.
