Restaurant review: The other Calithea Hail, mother of the gods, wife of starry heaven (Homeric hymn to Gea) The announcers keep repeating a word that sounds like the name of a cheese dip, but all I see on the screen is devastation. I reach for my cookbook, trying to find out more about tsunami, and come up with different Tsatsiki (yoghurt dip) recipes. On television, they keep using the word as if it were part of our regular vocabulary, as if tsunami is something we have for breakfast. I search the web and discover that tsunami is Japanese for a harbour wave. Then again, tsunami is a dip, the kind of dip only Gea could think of in one of her gloomy moods. Daughter of Chaos and mother-wife of Oranous (sky), Gea imprinted her name on the everyday word "geology" and was long forgotten. Grandmother of Zeus, the first ever deity, Gea has just demanded attention, and is getting loads of it, on prime time. Her big battle, millennia ago, was not captured on camera. In the Battle of the Giants, somewhere in ancient Macedonia, Zeus and his uncles (the Giants) are exchanging blows, hurling big boulders at each others, causing a lot of tsunami-style havoc. One giant drops a boulder and creates a holy mountain in Macedonia. A goddess fires back and creates a small peninsula -- Cassandra, renamed after Alexander the Great's uncle. The shock waves are felt in Alexandria, long before the city was built. Then centuries pass by. In the early 1920s, the mortals are fighting, this time the Greeks and Turks. The Turks torch Smyrna (now Izmir) and the entire million-plus population of Greeks and Armenians are running for dear life. They jump in overloaded boats and head to the nearest shores. Some survivors find their way to Cassandra and start a new town; Calithea, or Good View. Soon afterward, another Calithea appears in Alexandria, this one a tavern. Two Greeks, Michel Mikhas and Constantine Papas, started the establishment that stands to this day beside the Italian Consulate in Alexandria. I chanced upon Calithea a few years ago and then forgot where it was. On a day trip to Alexandria, with the Owl and the Pharmacist, I take a wrong turn and there it is. We had made plans to eat elsewhere, and immediately change our mind. After a walk by the sea all the way to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, we head back to the place that makes one of the most authentic Greek delicacy you can find anywhere in this country; the shredded calf stomach with cumin goes by the name of Trypa (the hole). "How many fingers do you see?" The man holds his hands up, looking at them with the intensity of someone who's just had a manicure. Rafiq Haroun, the current owner of Calithea, moved from Cairo to Alexandria in 1966, took a morning job with Bolanaki, the brandy manufacturer, and began working nights for Papas at this very establishment. He started out washing dishes, hence the reference to fingers. "I used to have 12 fingers, now they are 10. You know why? Two have melted away, washing dishes in the kitchen," the 70-year-old says in a gruff, weary, Godfather-like tone. "Tell me about the food, tell me frankly," he says. The place feels like a genuine Greek tavern, quiet and unpretentious, but ready to get up and have a ball at any minute. The calamari in the tajin was a bit hard and the sea bass fish under-spiced, I tell him. But the potato wedges were excellent, so was the babaganoug, potato salad, cheese dip, and of course the Trypa a la Greka, which Haroun says is cooked in fresh tomato sauce, just the way Papas used to serve it decades ago. Restaurant-bar Calithea, (03) 484 7508, 82 Al-Geish (Corniche) Street, off Midan Al-Raml, next to the Italian Consulate, Alexandria, open 9am- 2am, offers sea food and grills in old world ambiance with sea view. Lunch for three, LE180. By Nabil Shawkat
