The Long Lunch
In praise of the two-hour lunch by the water on Skyros, where the meal is not an interruption of the day but the point of it.
There is a particular table we keep returning to, a few steps from the sand, under a reed canopy that throws moving stripes of shade across the cloth. We sit down at one and stand up, if we are doing it properly, at three.
This is not a meal you fit into a day. It is the day. Everything else, the swim before, the nap after, arranges itself around it.
How it goes
It begins with whatever the kitchen made that morning: a tomato salad, the soft sour cheese they call xynotyri, warm bread, a few small plates. Then, if there are two of you and an appetite, the lobster pasta the island is known for, shared from one wide bowl, the shellfish flavouring every strand. A small carafe of local wine, sweating in the heat. No phones. No plan for the afternoon.
The sea does the work of entertainment. Someone swims out and turns to float on their back. A fishing boat noses into the little harbour. The light, which was hard at noon, begins its long softening toward gold. Nobody brings the bill until you ask, and you are in no hurry to ask.
What you’re really buying
You can eat faster, of course, and cheaper, and you will have missed the entire thing. The long lunch is not about the food alone, though the food is honest and good. It is about being given permission, for two unbroken hours, to do nothing but be where you are. Skyros gives that permission easily. It is harder to find than you’d think.
When you’re ready to choose a table of your own, our shortlist is in the best seaside tavernas, and the dishes to look for are in what to eat in Skyros.
More from the Journal soon. To build long lunches into a slow week, start here.