Nikos Nyfoudis in the cuffs of Tiffany’s! The news spread like a rocket, the Iktinou Street restaurant, which in 2013 went off the rails by ceasing to serve its famous complé potatoes and its famous stuffed burger, is now gone! But this rapot can be started differently: You’re not a true Thessalonikian if all those gloomy closed years, passing outside Iktinou, didn’t make you long for its glorious urban cooking. Until the other day when Nyfoudis decided to restart it. There, a stone’s throw from the intersection with Tsimiski, surrounded by equally iconic landmarks such as the offices of the newspaper Hellenic North, Vildiridis’ diamond shop and the underground club Basement, Tiffany’s restaurant wrote its culinary epic until it faded away in 2013. But time has returned it better than ever and tastier than ever! I’ve tried it, I’m signing up, and I’m moving on.
Kudos for Nyfoudis’ decision to invest in a new yesterday with wonderful nostalgia for the future. The reopening of Tiffany’s in the heart of the city seems to me personally like a reminder of how, with whom and why in the Thessaloniki of the future, tomorrow must have something of our precious and precious yesterday, but at the same time risk a step further. And I assure you that what Nyfoudis is risking is not to reopen a restaurant (which is already shaking and fizzing), his aim is higher: the aim, you see, for the new Tiffany’s is not to be a hit for two or three seasons, but to remain the classic, long-lasting spot that it was in the past.
For those living in the northern Thessaloniki-Jerusalem of gastronomy, Nifoudis of the meat market Tzaki Ho in Chortiatis, AnfanGate in Guadeloupe at Teloglion and the super-successful 1905 London (Cretan cuisine in the heart of Great Britain) and The Life Goddess (Greek. Deli. Devine) in Bloomsbury, represents a generation of entrepreneurs who dared to raise the bar and were vindicated. I don’t know many Thessalonikians who split their lives between two countries instead of sitting on their eggs and attempting recipes from scratch. But with Tiffany’s, I think the guy has changed level.
And so the time has come for me to introduce you to the rest of the team with whom I have the honour of dining and discussing their philosophy, tasting excellent cooking after an ideal wine pairing: at the age of 27, the Cephalonian celebrity chef, Asimakis Haniotis-Vallianatos, won his first Michelin star for the juggling he did in the kitchen of the London Pied a Terre. In a few days he is preparing his own restaurant in Chelsea, called Myrtos. He is the one who, together with the equally moving chef Prodromos Asimakis, implemented Nifoudis’ manifesto for the new Tiffany’s: 60 labels of small and large producers by the glass and 42 fine dishes, so that the list does not run out quickly and the Thessaloniki resident can pass by and pass by again and try and try again. I think they succeeded. Absolutely. Their team set up food that was simple, but with such Greek and cosmopolitan twist that left me speechless.
A beetroot with blue cheese cream, tangerine gel, walnut biscuit, pistachio Aegina and aged balsamic vinegar along with the Roots (salad with wild Tinos seaweed, chicory greens, ascordulakus, ascolumbus, stamnagathi, lily, olive oil and wild Tinos lemon), ideally accompany our wine. It is a noble white from grapes of the family of Aslanis Laskaris from Michaniona, which Nifoudis vinifies meracly in ten thousand bottles of his wholehearted inspiration and experimentation of mild intervention.
Here is the news for those who had doubts about the identity of the new Tiffany’s. Well, the moorish skewers and the bonfires that the boys set up daily are a feast. And tradition. And tavernite imported with great baking skill into their urban lounge. Good time, back at our table, where I sample a crunchy kokoretsi, roasted to a five-course meal, its lung, livers and sweetbreads sharing Greece and cholesterol, served on dazzling white tablecloths of precise atmosphere.
