CYPRUS GOURMET: I raise my hat (and my glass) to the ladies

Wish you were here… by Serena Smith
The biggest compliment I have ever been paid as hostess was when a Greek friend called me ‘the Maria Callas of the kitchen’. By mixing his metaphors, he made me swell with pride. Now, mixing the realm of art, and the more basic art of eating well, has taken on new meaning in Cyprus with the inauguration this week of Art-En-Route, a website designed to lure tourists and locals on their way to lunch into the studios of working artists in the lovely Cypriot countryside.

Last Thursday (8th May), Maria Etheridge (pictured at left) and 19 of her fellow artists collectively launched www.art-en-route-cyprus.com at Zante restaurant outside Limassol. The brief for the introductory exhibition was to come up with 10.5 x 15 cm post-card-sized art works in any medium, for a uniform selling price of 30 euro apiece.
The result was a riot of colour, themes and media, ranging from minute pencil drawings and mini-mosaics to designs in wool, silk and quilt, as well as oil on glass. ‘Wish you were here to see the flowers’ reads one beautiful creation in softest wool, next to another artist’s crisp pencil sketch of a Cypriot harvest scene beckoning with ‘Wish you were here to tour the wine routes’.

“Cyprus Cheese and Wine” by Gilly Keef – a noted water-colourist and long time resident of Anogyra, whose delicate works have graced many homes in Cyprus and elsewhere, including mine.

Zante restaurant took the general idea of ‘small is beautiful’ into their tasty morsels on opening night.
Enterprising restaurateurs may do well to check out the website for opportunities to piggy-back on to the artists in their area who created a very imaginative and useful website complete with GPS coordinates. Otherwise they can contact the organiser, Maria, on [email protected] .
Building your next trip to a tavern around an artist’s studio is a novel way of selling Cyprus as a tourist destination to both the locals and the incoming hordes from abroad. Well done, artists! I prize nothing more in my distant home than two paintings bought from artists at their studios in the days when we still had Open Studios. Together with the art work goes the memory of the whole situation: the drive there, the artist herself, her work place. Mixing the art of travel, that of the kitchen and art itself is an unbeatable proposition.

A truly amazing couple

Regular readers of my “old” columns will remember Elena and Bassam who run Orexi Catering, in Paphos. The words “wonderful Lebanese food” sum up their cooking, but there is much more to it than that. Battling through Big C, Elena not only runs the business with ever more gusto, but raises substantial sums for charity too.

Photo: A small selection of Elena and Bassam’s super Lebanese food

I am happy to quote from her latest email: Last week she says “We had more than 60 hardy folk in the Orexi Secret Garden enjoying Bassam’s freshly baked flat-bread with all range of scrumptious toppings. And we managed to raise just over 1000 Euros for the Cancer Charities of Paphos – thank you to all who attended, put up with the downpour and helped make it such an enjoyable and worthy event”.

Visit to dairy farm