The Farm-to-Table Restaurant Bringing the Cretan Diet Back in Vogue

Once hailed in the land­mark Seven Country Study as the lead­ing rea­son peo­ple in Crete suf­fered fewer instances of car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease than their Western coun­ter­parts, the Cretan diet has since been usurped on the Greek island by a more Western diet.

Undeterred by chang­ing eat­ing habits, the owner and man­agers of Peskesi, an organic farm-to-table restau­rant in the island’s cap­i­tal, are work­ing to rekin­dle the Cretan diet’s pop­u­lar­ity. Their mis­sion is to edu­cate tourists and Cretans about the island’s rich culi­nary her­itage.

“The need to revive recipes from Crete is because the tra­di­tional way of liv­ing is chang­ing as years go by,” Zacharias Magganas, the restaurant’s man­ager, told Olive Oil Times.

“The peo­ple now gather in cities, leav­ing the vil­lages and their tra­di­tions behind,” he added. ​“Globalization also affects food tra­di­tions a lot. For exam­ple, pizza and burg­ers are eas­ier to find in Crete than wild greens cooked with lamb.”

The Cretan diet is widely used to describe the habit­ual eat­ing pat­terns of 13 vil­lages around Kastelli, in the cen­ter of the island, which par­tic­i­pated in Ancel Keys’ study dur­ing the 1950s and 1960s.

The tra­di­tional Cretan diet is char­ac­ter­ized by a high con­sump­tion of fruit, veg­eta­bles, cere­als, and legumes with a small amount of dairy prod­ucts, pre­dom­i­nantly yogurt and cheese.

Compared with typ­i­cal Western diets, the Cretan diet con­tains lit­tle red meat – less than 50 grams per week, mainly lamb – and more fish. Extra vir­gin olive oil is the diet’s pri­mary fat source.

“You can see this by the olive oil con­sump­tion in Crete, which is 23 kilo­grams per annum,” Peskesi owner Panagiotis Magganas told Olive Oil Times through a trans­la­tor, his nephew, Zacharias Magganas.

By com­par­i­son, annual olive oil con­sump­tion is esti­mated to reach 12 kilo­grams per per­son in the rest of Greece.

The Cretan diet is one vari­a­tion of the Mediterranean diet and pri­mar­ily dif­fers from oth­ers due to its focus on local and sea­sonal fruits and veg­eta­bles. ​“The other key ingre­di­ent in the Cretan diet is the more than 200 types of wild greens,” Panagiotis Magganas con­firmed.

“We try to be the place where you can find the ​‘lost trea­sures’ of our land,” Zacharias Magganas added. ​“A good exam­ple is the pro­mo­tion of man­aro­lia or biza, a Cretan legume that owes its exis­tence to our restau­rant. Its con­sump­tion has gone through the roof just a few years after we offered it in our restau­rant.”

Before found­ing the restau­rant, Panagiotis Magganas owned an organic farm. Initially, he wanted to cre­ate an acad­emy to teach locals and tourists about the Cretan diet.

“But for bud­get rea­sons, we made the restau­rant, which is more acces­si­ble to peo­ple. From the start, we wanted to use the restau­rant for edu­ca­tional pur­poses, using the food to teach peo­ple about the Cretan diet and its ingre­di­ents,” Magganas said. ​“Our goal is to serve tra­di­tional food in a mod­ern way.”

According to Magganas, very few Cretan restau­rants served tra­di­tional food when he opened Peskesi.

“Since Peskesi was cre­ated, the con­cept of the Cretan diet has started to change, and as the years have gone by, more restau­rants have been try­ing to fol­low the idea of serv­ing tra­di­tional Cretan foods,” he said. ​“People’s think­ing about Cretan food has changed a lot through the years.”

Magganas founded the farm 25 years ago, and Peskesi has fol­lowed bio­dy­namic and regen­er­a­tive agri­cul­tural prac­tices since.

“We are a cer­ti­fied organic and sus­tain­able restau­rant, but we don’t do any­thing more than what Cretans used to do,” he said. ​“The farm does not use fer­til­izer, phy­to­chem­i­cals or ani­mal feed. ​“We also serve sea­son­ally avail­able foods.”

The restau­rant tries to source all its food from the sur­round­ing com­mu­nity. Whatever can­not be obtained locally is brought from other parts of Greece. ​“Nothing is imported from out­side of Greece,” Magganas con­firmed.

Four types of extra vir­gin olive oil are used in the kitchen: one robust olive oil for the wild green salad, a milder oil for the Greek salad, one for cook­ing and one for fry­ing. No other type of edi­ble oil is used in the food prepa­ra­tion.

About half of the olive oil used in Peskesi’s kitchen comes from the company’s groves, and the rest is pur­chased from local pro­duc­ers.

“For the last seven years, we’ve had an olive oil list with the same con­cept as a wine list: cus­tomers can choose from 10 extra vir­gin olive oils from Crete,” Magganas said. ​“Customers can pair the olive oil with food or taste it on its own to expe­ri­ence their dif­fer­ences.”

The restau­rant uses three dif­fer­ent vari­etals: Koroneiki, Tsounati and Chondrolia. ​“But we don’t look at the vari­eties; we look at the pro­file of the olive oil,” he said.

“For exam­ple, for the Greek salad, we use olive oil with intense, pun­gent and bit­ter char­ac­ter­is­tics and intense fruiti­ness,” Magganas added. ​“For green sal­ads, we use olive oil that is less pun­gent and bit­ter but also very har­mo­nious.”

Along with olive oil tast­ings at the restau­rant, Peskesi offers farm tours, cook­ing classes and tra­di­tional bread-bak­ing lessons. ​“For the past four years, the farm has opened for sea­son since the first month of sum­mer when the weather is nice,” Magganas said.

Many restau­rant guests have returned to visit the farm. Magganas believes that guests are enthused by see­ing where the food they use to pre­pare their meals orig­i­nates and by the zero-waste phi­los­o­phy behind it all.

“They love to see how we’re mak­ing com­post from the left­over food from the tables, how we use every­thing to enrich the soil for our veg­eta­bles, the ani­mals that live on the farm and the ecosys­tem,” said Agelos Bougias, who man­ages the farm.

“We try to make the land bet­ter, not worse,” he added. ​“The soil is health­ier now than it was 25 years ago.”

However, Peskesi’s organic and regen­er­a­tive farm-to-table model has plenty of chal­lenges. Magganas said the tra­di­tional Cretan restau­rant con­cept is expen­sive to run.

Since the restau­rant only pur­chases locally-grown and pro­duced food, price is not the first con­sid­er­a­tion, and the restau­rant pur­chases more expen­sive ingre­di­ents to remain authen­tic.

Growing endemic veg­eta­bles and plant vari­eties at the farm often means the com­pany sac­ri­fices yield for authen­tic­ity. For exam­ple, Peskesi only uses a native Cretan tomato vari­ety that pro­duces smaller fruits than most com­mer­cial vari­eties.

As a result, the restau­rant earns lower mar­gins on each dish than a con­ven­tional restau­rant might, which Magganas said can be dif­fi­cult to com­mu­ni­cate to cus­tomers.

However, Bougias, Mangannas and his nephew believe the restau­rant is becom­ing a point of pride for Cretans. Mangannas points out that many tourists who visit the restau­rant come based on rec­om­men­da­tions from local peo­ple.

He believes some of this pride comes from nos­tal­gia, with cus­tomers say­ing the food is rem­i­nis­cent of what their grand­moth­ers cooked for them in their child­hood vil­lages.

“All in all, the new model of liv­ing pushes our tra­di­tional recipes to the side, so our ulti­mate goal is to fight back and pro­mote our food his­tory from the Minoan times as much as pos­si­ble,” Zacharias Magganas con­cluded.