I have an almost debilitating fascination with all things non-American, so when this week's Collective topic was assigned, I rushed to Pappas, a Greek restaurant near my office. I told Moe and Marzee Baptiste—the husband and wife team that own and operate Pappas—that I needed to learn to make the perfect sandwich. Moe said if I would trust him, he would teach me. (Trust, I knew, meant onions. When I first ordered from Pappas two years ago, I told Moe several times of my abhorrence of onions, and wondered aloud if Marzee wouldn't mind just setting all the onions in the kitchen outside the back door while she prepared my gyro.) I told Moe I would trust him, and he said, "Welcome to my kitchen."*
Show me a girl with her feet
planted firmly on the ground,
and I'll show you a girl who
can't put her pants on.
- Annik Marchand
If you plan to spend the day working in a Greek restaurant, here's the thing you need to know: you will be the ugliest person in the kitchen. The guidebooks on Greece do not tell you about this—the unequivocal beauty of the Greek people. The Greeks, they say, invented tragedy and comedy and democracy. The Greeks, they say, like their parties. What they do not say is that Greek men and women have warm dark skin and rich dark eyes and such perfect, perfect, long, long eyelashes that if all 11 million Greeks blinked at once it would set off an atmospheric phenomenon so intense it might just cause the Mediterranean's first typhoon. The Greeks are gorgeous people.
I am confronted with this reality in a less than ideal way: with a knife in my hand.
When I show up to Pappas Greek Restaurant for a cooking lesson, the oldest Baptiste daughter, who is just about my age, is in the kitchen, ready to teach me to slice vegetables. I am immediately, wholly smitten with her—not in small part because of her accent. (And the eyelashes no one warned me about.) She hands me a knife and invites me to share her workspace. She will chop the onions; I will chop the tomatoes. I tell her I am there because her dad is meant to teach me how to make the world's greatest sandwich. She rewards me with a smile. Feeling a sudden, inexplicable need to impress her, I say I trained as a chef in France. And that by France, of course, I mean Washington D.C., where my dear friend Kat lives. And Cooks. Many French dishes. "Mise en place," I say French-ly, waving my knife around. The explanation of the phrase reverberates in my head in the voice of Kat's boyfriend, with whom I shared a kitchen over Thanksgiving. "Mise en place," Echo-Seth says. "Get your shit in place." I smile stupidly and slice into my finger.
The oldest Baptiste son enters the kitchen a few minutes later as I am working on my second tomato—already I am six vegetables behind—and he, too, smiles at me. Why does the Greek Bureau of Tourism not mention these smiles! Before I can impress him with French cooking terms, I gash open another finger. Moe takes away my knife, assuming—correctly, I suppose—that if all his children stop by the restaurant today, I will leave the kitchen with only a single thumb in tact.
He tells me I can watch him prepare some Greek potatoes, and he will tell me about the gyro.
The gyro isn't a sandwich in the traditional American sense. Firstly, it uses a pita instead of loaf bread. And secondly, it doesn't have any peanut butter inside. At Pappas you can get a Gyro with chicken, steak, or lamb; though Moe says it's not an official gyro unless it contains lamb. (The menu begs to differ, but I don't point this out.) The standard gyro comes with lettuce, tomato, onions, feta cheese, and tzatziki—a sauce made of yogurt, mint, garlic, cucumbers, and other seasonings that vary from recipe to recipe, family to family. In Greece the gyro is called "souvlaki," and can be purchased in restaurants and from street vendors in cities big and small. Moe tells me that the gyro originated in Thessaloniki. I tell him Thessaloniki (Thessalonica) is one of the first places to which the Apostle Paul exported Christianity. He tells me the souvlaki is now widely known in Thessalokiki as the "hamburger of Greece." It's a sad, little evangelical bookend.
Moe is not a tall man; at five feet, eight and three-quarters inches, I can see clear over the top of his head. He prepares potatoes while his family buzzes around the kitchen: slicing, washing, sautéing, chattering away in Greek, being beautiful. When he finishes the potatoes, Moe invites me to sit down in the restaurant with him to take some notes. I want to protest that I haven't gotten to cook anything yet, but I have the feeling he will not let me near another knife. I was Pappas' first customer; I have been eating here for years, but when I sit down across the table from Moe, I notice—really notice—his appearance for the first time: his sun-soaked skin, his affable smile, his unruly, gray-flecked hair, his deeply generous eyes. It unnerves me when he meets my gaze, because I know his look. His gift is seeing past the skin of a person. I have known this for a long time, because it's my gift, too. But I don't want to talk about what's past my skin. I want to talk about how onions ruin sandwiches.
"I hear you are leaving us," he says.
This is true. I resigned my job weeks ago, and at the end of the month, I am leaving them. Them: my favorite Greek restaurant. And them: my co-workers—who apparently eat here and tell our office business. I nod that yes, what he has heard is true.
He asks me where I am going, and I shrug that I don't know. I try to steer the conversation toward meats, and he asks if I am going to travel. I tell him probably a bit, and ask about basmati rice. I get the feeling he knows how nervous I am about leaving my job, about pursuing things far outside the Safe Dream Zone, about disappointing my family, about angering my employer. I have never said any of these things out loud, certainly not to Moe, yet he is pealing away at me in the same fashion as his daughter with the onions. I tell him I really just want to talk about sandwiches.
So Moe tells me exactly what goes into making the perfect sandwich: fresh ingredients, homemade sauces, affection. I take notes. When I have filled up two pages, he stops, saying that he really only promised one good paragraph; he doesn't want to give away all of Marzee's secrets. At just that moment Marzee shows up with two gyros, and Moe asks me to tell him about all the sandwiches I've ever eaten. I tell him of a cheeseburger in an outdoor cafe in Mexico; of a jerk chicken sandwich from a roadside stand in Jamaica; of a truly terrible egg and cheese sandwich at the Christmas festival in Bath; of fish (with chips) just outside St. Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square; of my grandfather's smoked pork and homemade sauce on the back porch in spring; of peanut butter on white bread shared with an orphan in Montego Bay; of my very own grilled cheese; of who-knows-what-all meat on bread in Scotland.
When we finish our sandwiches, Moe wipes his mouth with a napkin. "How was it?" he asks.
"The best sandwich I ever had," I tell him. And we both know I mean it.
Moe rests his chin on his hand and looks across the table at me. "That is why you do not have to worry," he says. "About your job, about anything."
"Because this is the best sandwich I ever had?" I ask.
"Today." Moe says. "This is the best sandwich you ever had because you had it today. Tomorrow your favorite sandwich will be the one you have tomorrow. The next day the same. The day after that, the same. The moment is your friend: every sandwich is your favorite. You are always home."
It seems like an insult to agree, yet I know he's right. For the first time in months I don't feel worried. The truth is: I like sandwiches, and seeing to the truth of a person. I will be okay.
Moe pats my hand and says I can do the dishes. I pick up both of our plates and forks and follow him to the kitchen, where another of his sons has arrived. I pile the dishes into the sink. The second son smiles. Everyone in this kitchen is prettier than me. And here, too, I am at home.
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