cafeneio

what is cafeneio you might ask? when you are traveling and you're starving at a bar or cafe you had better order food--although you never know what you'll get and somehow you won't end up with the tab--with your wine, or coffee, or grappa. simply, it's the wonderful ritual of eating and drinking and eating some more and then drinking some more. ivonne, whom owen has dubbed the queen of "fancy food," made a gorgeous variety of hummus and spreads--from a roasted pepper with. . .

oh, wait i can't tell you. ivonne is notoriously secretive when it comes to recipes. really. don't ask her for a recipe. i think it's an ecuadorian sin. what i've learned is that i have to arrive early for dinner and carefully watch what she sneaks out of her magical cupboards. but then her ingredients include oregano kostas snuck in his suitcase in a ziplock bag in greece or fava beans harvested from their garden that only grow in their precise latitute and taste sweeter because ivon is a poetess.

but back to the cafeneio. i think it's because owen carries a golden ticket in his side pocket, but we were lucky enough to join this wonderfully nourishing ritual and you can see that owen definitely enjoyed dipping and tasting and drinking. he had his own box of lemonade and the rest of us decided we might as well celebrate. i'm not sure if you can see but we decided to pull out the grappa. and since we had just been talking about the film bottleshock and the 1976 "judgement of paris" we thought it would be fun to choose our pour based on a blind tasting. we had a peruvian bottle that andreas had brought home from his fearless travels (follow them here), an ecuadorian bottle (a great grandchild of a german scientist whose hobby brought the only grapes to the region), a greek bottle harvested in a 200 year old distillery (ok, this was a blind tasting and while i was trying to take notes i was doing a blind tasting).

i think at one point ivonne and i had figured out which pour belonged to which bottle but by then we'd been warned to drink water and then opened a bottle of rabbit ridge rhone style wine which was amazing (and i was tipped off that gerard's in redlands is carring this as a buy a 2nd bottle for pennies deal) all the while dipping in secret spreads and indulging in home grown tomatoes and feta with that secret oregano. . .