Season 2 : Best meals in Europe
Episode 11
67 minutes
Kelly Groehler built The WTAF Show around a simple complaint: women make up the majority of the travel market, yet almost every food and travel show on air is hosted by men. In this episode, the founder of The WTAF Show (Women. Travel. Art. Food.) joins The European Compass to talk about telling food and travel stories through women chefs, women artists, and women entrepreneurs across Europe.
We talk about her most memorable meal in Europe, a market day in Uzès, France, why Athens has displaced London as the place she cannot stop thinking about, and what she found filming at Varvakios Agora market and Caravin Wine & Wanderlust. Kelly also explains why she refuses to film inside restaurant kitchens, how Greether is changing solo female travel safety, and what is next for the show in Iceland, including the Bocuse d’Or and a very specific comparison of Icelandic and American hot dogs.
If you plan your trips around food, and you are tired of travel content that treats women as an afterthought, this conversation is for you.
Featured in this episode
- Greether: safe travel for women
- Athens: Caravin Wine & Wanderlust wine bar and Iodio restaurant,
- Valencia: La Salita Michelin stared restaurant,
- Porto: emotivo restaurant
- Reykjavík: Fröken restaurant
Transcript of The European Compass : A Food & Travel Podcast : Episode 11
Episode 11 transcript | The European Compass, Season 2
Hello Kelly, thank you so much for joining us on the European Compass podcast.
Kelly: I’m delighted to be here, thank you for reaching out. It’s been fun talking with you on Threads.
Julia: It has, it has indeed. Right, before we get into any more discussion, I’m going to ask you the same question I’m asking all my guests. I’m going to ask you to tell me about your most memorable meal in Europe. It doesn’t have to be your best meal, just your most memorable.
Most Memorable Meal: Uzès, France, 2015
Kelly: That’s a complicated question, because there are so many. When you’re producing a food and travel show, I have the fortunate opportunity to have a lot of different memorable meals. I think one of my most memorable meals was, in fact this was in 2015, my husband and I had decided, well, I had decided to resign from an executive position with Berkshire Hathaway, which is the company operated by Mr Warren Buffett. It was the turning point in my career where I thought, wow, I made it to the top and I don’t like it. So we decided, I quit the job, and we were going to be moving back to Minnesota, where we’re based here in Minneapolis. We put everything in storage and went to, we went to Europe for a month, and we were down in Uzès, which is near Nîmes. It’s in southern France, not quite as far down as Montpellier, but in that direction. We were there because a relative of my husband’s had recommended we check it out, and we’d done no research for going there.
Julia: Personal recommendations are always the best.
Kelly: Absolutely. It was my husband’s first time in Europe, and it was our son’s first time in Europe, and our son at the time had just turned thirteen. So the three of us went to Uzès, and it’s just charming. It’s the walled city with the square in the middle, and all of the different shops, and every morning was starting, sitting in the square with a café au lait, and then we would drive around the area. Pont du Gard is near where we were based, and it was a Saturday where we went to the Saturday market in the square. We picked up a rotisserie chicken, and some cheeses, and some roasted potatoes and some pastries, and there was a quiche with olives in particular that I remember. It was hot, it was such a hot day, we were there a few days before Bastille Day, and we ended up driving out to Pont du Gard and going to the pebble beach right by the river, and spent the afternoon by the bridge.
Our thirteen year old, I have a video of him climbing up on the ramparts and jumping twenty feet into the river. I’m also so proud of him, but I think that food, and that day, is just a memory that really jumps ahead of everything else I’ve eaten and experienced with food. It’s such a beautiful place. I was actually there last year, and we did canoeing, we hired kayaks further up the river, and my first view of the Pont du Gard was actually from a canoe. You’re rowing along, and then you just go round a bend and it’s there, and it’s such an amazing structure, and the fact that it’s been there for so long, it’s mind blowing. It was absolutely stunning. The other thing I remember, because it was so hot that day, that water was bracing. It’s so clean and cold, it was just a delightful day. I have to go back there, that’s on my list to revisit. I don’t often get really excited about going back to the same place again and again. London and New York City are exceptions to that, and Paris, I would add Paris to that list as well.
I have a girlfriend who, she’s not an expat, she permanently left the US last year and relocated to Paris, and we’ve talked about filming episodes there. I need to give it another stint, because when we were there, we got to Paris on Bastille Day and it was crazy, it was so crowded. The three of us are not that type of traveller, we like to roam, we like to wander, we don’t want to be in a tour group, and there were tour groups everywhere. It was beautiful though, it was wonderful to sit in the Tuileries Gardens and watch the fireworks and the Eiffel Tower light up. That was just stunning, we had some amazing food there. The Rodin Museum was my favourite, I don’t know why, but seeing the Gates of Hell in real life was just kind of unnerving, and amazing and cool from an art experience standpoint. I need to go back and give it another chance, there is just so much to discover in Paris.
Julia: Absolutely. If I go to Paris, I go anywhere for work because it’s my capital city, and I quite often have to go, there’s the only place that things are on. But if I go to be a tourist, I go in winter. We’ve done the gap in between Christmas and New Year a couple of times, and that’s lovely, because all the lights are still up but the crowds have gone and there’s not a lot on, and it’s just beautiful. So that’s my little tip of when to go to Paris.
Kelly: It’s a marvellous tip, especially for women. I think we are so conditioned, certainly from a US perspective, to fit travel experiences, all of vacations, into very specific slots in the year. You need to do it in the summer months, or over the holidays, the idea of travelling off season. I’m really keen on this, if you’re not tied to school holidays, then the best time to go pretty much anywhere in Europe is when the European schools are in.
Julia: Right, yeah. And within each country in Europe there’s domestic tourism, so the vast majority of crowds, even though there are a lot of foreign tourists, there’s still a majority of domestic tourists. So if you go somewhere like Madrid during the Spanish school holidays, it’s going to be packed, but if you go outside of the Spanish school holidays, at a time when all the European schools are in, you get a much better experience. I think January would be a great time to go somewhere, because I don’t mind the cold, I don’t mind wet, and I’d like not having big crowds around me. The hotels drop their prices in January too, because they’ve had the summer and the Christmas rush, and then January ends up being a little bit quieter, so it can be quite a good time to come. You should come to Paris next January, we should make a date.
Kelly: We’ve been thinking about Paris for this fall. This is a transitional year for me though, with the show, and what has actually evolved from that is, this is year one of me running this production company full time. My ambitions at the beginning of 2026, I wrote a Substack post on this where I said, you haven’t heard from me in a while, because I started the year thinking this is what was going to happen, and it’s been picked up like a snow globe and someone shook it and said, this is what you’re going to do instead. So I still have Paris on the list for the back half of 2026, which we are in, but it hasn’t fully taken shape yet. I’m an optimist and I’m tenacious, so we’ll see what we can do, but definitely if not 2026, it’s going to be 2027.
Paris, London, and the Trip That Changed Everything
Julia: You’ll just want to keep going and keep going.
Kelly: Oh, I mean, I love London. I lived in London for six years. I love London, but Paris is just something special.
Julia: You’ve spent a reasonable amount of time in the UK, haven’t you?
Kelly: I have. It’s interesting, we just dropped a reel yesterday on our social channels for our latest episode, from Iodio, a restaurant in Athens, and it’s me telling the story of the first time I went overseas, got on a plane without my parents using a passport. I was fifteen, so it was forty years ago this year. I legitimately tried to find a legal way to stay there, not as a fifteen year old, I loved London. I think for me it was the era I was growing up in, it was 1986 and I was full in on the MTV generation, I wanted to be their patron saint, Martha Quinn had my dream job. London was just that city to arrive in, that I had seen so often interpreted in videos and in music performances, and I had never actually been there. I also had a deep love of history, I think Queen Elizabeth the First is one of the most fascinating characters in history, how did a woman do that six hundred, seven hundred years ago. Granted yes, it was the kickoff of the rise of the British Empire, but I’m just fascinated, and so all of these things were coming together.
I was fifteen years old, and I got there on a field trip with other kids who ran cross country, the long distance running competition popular in US high schools. I had actually blown out my ankle a few months before the trip, so I didn’t have to compete when I went, I just went for the joy of it, and it was joy all around. I remember the very first meal I ate when we got there, aside from the continental breakfast at the hotel, but even that, I was like, English breakfast tea and these hard rolls, this is awesome, and they’re like, it’s bread and tea, you’re making such a big deal out of this. Mincemeat pies, I’d never had those before, I fell madly in love with them. I now make them every single holiday, or I go to World Market and pick some up that are pre made.
But my first meal over there, well, we were kids, and especially in the eighties, what did kids eat, we loved pizza. So we went to a pizzeria in the neighbourhood we were staying, we were west of Kensington, I don’t remember the specifics. They have a fabulous cheese market in Chiswick, by the way, the Chiswick cheese market, we did an episode there that was so delicious, but that day we squeezed both that cheese market and Sunday roast at the Rose and Crown into the same day, I was so uncomfortably full by the end of it. But the pizzeria we went to, they brought the pizza out and there were anchovies on it, and we were all kids from southwest Minnesota and South Dakota, most of the kids were horrified, and I loved it, I was like, this is great, and just kept eating it. So yeah, London, London just blew my mind wide open, and it’s always been kind of that anchor point for me. I took myself there in 2019 for a birthday trip, a long weekend, and just ate everything I could and walked everywhere, and it was wonderful.
The joy of what I do with The WTAF Show is to get away from what the TripAdvisor lists are telling you, or what Stanley Tucci is telling you on his food and travel show, the idea is don’t go where everyone else is going. I had friends who were in Santorini last week, and they stood in line to get the photo with the blue dome. I don’t understand why anyone would stand in line to have a photo taken when you already know what the photo is going to look like, because you’ve already seen the photo. For instance, one of our partners, my friend Andrea Makros runs a travel company called Preve Travel, she’s going to be the first one to tell you, here are four other places you can go and get just as good a photo.
Julia: Exactly.
Kelly: So the logic behind why we travel and where we go is what I’m really interested in disrupting, especially for women. The idea of standing in line for a dumb shot in Santorini, why go. We just filmed in Athens in May, and by the way, Athens has displaced London now as the place where I’m like, I’ve got to go back.
Athens Has Displaced London
Kelly: I don’t know what it is, the energy in Athens is crazy.
Julia: Oh my gosh, other than a quick day trip to France when I was about sixteen, it’s what you do when you’re in the UK, you used to be able to just get day trips to France, but other than that, Athens was my first experience of continental Europe.
Kelly: Totally mind blowing, from a girl from Yorkshire.
Julia: So it was just otherworldly, the noise and the bustle.
Kelly: All of those things, yes. It’s some of the most hideous traffic I’ve ever seen in my life, getting anywhere in Athens, patience is a virtue you must have, especially when you have a filming crew. You just have to work it in, build the time in, slow down. But for me it was the discovery of these places, and I think even more so, the power of women in the story of Athens, in the myths. We did do the Acropolis, we didn’t film there, they wanted an exorbitant amount for a film permit and I said no. But we did go, we signed up for an eight am tour thinking we’d beat the crowds.
Julia: No.
Kelly: Twenty thousand people visit the Acropolis every single day. It’s fine, and the Parthenon Museum, or the Acropolis Museum I believe is what it’s actually called, it was a great experience, it was wonderful to see. But we ended up going out instead, about forty minutes outside of Athens, to Vravrona, which is right on the coast, and that’s where the temple of Artemis is based. It’s the first one, not the one that’s in Turkey, that’s considered one of the ancient wonders of the world, this is the one in Vravrona. This is the place where the myth was born of the girl who was scratched by a bear, and the Athenians came back and killed the bear, well, you just pissed off the god, because that was Artemis’s bear. You’d think, what do the gods typically do when they get mad at humans, destruction, all of these things. What Artemis did instead is she said, that’s it, you’re now going to send all your daughters to me, and they’re going to stay here for three years. So you’d have young girls, preteens, adolescents, who would go out for three years at the temple of Artemis, and essentially were raised to be women.
So from an ancient standpoint, essentially Artemis was like an ideal feminist, I thought that was amazing, not only the compassion for the girls in the face of being upset by the mortals, I was just blown away. I love the idea of having three years of women only, a commune, for three whole years, living just with women must be amazing. These women weren’t being encouraged to go out and become Athena, or leaders of commerce, but they were being completely focused on their feminine energy. That story, to me, from a travel standpoint, is far more interesting than standing in line at the Acropolis with twenty thousand other people.
So we went out there, we spent time with two archaeologists from the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sport, we were there at sunrise, we have drone shots of the sun coming up at this temple. These are the types of experiences that I get so excited about sharing, because those are the things that we, first of all, we don’t see women in midlife in food and travel content.
Where Are the Women in Food and Travel Media?
Julia: We don’t, no we don’t. Samantha Brown, yes.
Kelly: That’s it, there she is, there she is. You have a few here and there, but they are by no means given the platform or the reach that these men hosted food and travel shows get. From a US standpoint, we look at this and think, great, we’ve got Rick Steves, we’ve got Phil Rosenthal, we’ve got Stanley Tucci, now we have Tony Shalhoub, he’s got a bread show, we’ve got Conan O’Brien, I think David Chang is picking up a new one again, we’ve got one of the guys from Queer Eye.
Julia: From Queer Eye, yes, Antoni, I’ve forgotten what his name is.
Kelly: That’s it. Eugene Levy, he’s Canadian, he’s a comedian, he’s a boomer, he’s hilarious, they gave him a travel show on Apple TV because he hates travel, and I was like, okay, this is where I just start to think, I don’t have patience for this. If we know that the super consumer in travel is a woman over 50, the average traveller is a forty seven year old woman, she spends, just in the US alone, 214 billion dollars each year on travel, outspending any other demographic slice you’ve got, but we don’t see her in anything. We see these shows hosted by largely white men, and they’re all boomers, or we’re seeing the brands investing in these influencers, in the influencer culture, and I don’t see many middle aged women in the influencer culture either.
So I was sitting inside my corporate job, it was 2020, I was the global head of communications and public affairs for a holdings company of fitness and wellness brands, and I couldn’t travel anywhere. It was Mother’s Day 2020, and I thought, what am I going to do today, because usually that’s when I’d take a solo trip. I couldn’t travel, so I thought, I’m going to go watch some episodes of No Reservations. I still think that Anthony Bourdain, even though he was a man, I think his approach to storytelling is still the gold standard, show respect. I will say that until I embarked on The European Compass, my business, I had not heard of Anthony Bourdain.
Julia: Seriously. I was brought up in England, I moved to France twenty three years ago, no idea who the guy is. Same with Rick Steves, Rick Steves is exactly the same, and these are people who are so influential, particularly Rick Steves, in terms of European travel for Americans, and yet he really isn’t on the radar for the average British traveller or the average European traveller.
Kelly: And yet European travellers, I don’t know, it’s, so Anthony Bourdain is the same.
Julia: Yeah.
Kelly: Well, since he passed away, in 2018, he’s still a force, from a US culture perspective, he is a force, and I think there are a lot of imitations out there. I happen to have someone who is a consulting producer now on our show, and she worked on the No Reservations crew, so she worked with him, and she’s been more of just a cheerleader, and she’s in a couple of our episodes that we filmed last year in Brooklyn, her name’s Laurie Woolever. She was Bourdain’s first lieutenant, she co-wrote his books with him, she wrote the definitive biography. Right now she’s getting a lot of attention because a new movie just dropped this week called Tony, which is a movie about Anthony Bourdain, and she wrote a profile on the actor who plays him for Bon Appétit magazine. So these women are in my orbit as I’m building this, and one of the things they’ve said is, we’re really sick and tired of everything being the next Anthony Bourdain of this, or we want you to be the Anthony Bourdain of that. I have no interest in being Anthony Bourdain, I’m not Anthony Bourdain, I’ve had a very different life experience, and I’m very focused on women in midlife, because I’m a woman in midlife, I’m fifty five years old.
Back to 2020, it’s Mother’s Day, and I can’t travel, so I’m going to watch some episodes of Anthony Bourdain, and within half an hour, I’m starting to look at it differently than I ever had before, and I think, where are the women. I started really looking at it, and he’s talking with men, every once in a while you’ll have a woman show up in an episode, but then I started jumping around, and it was the first time I’d ever watched Phil Rosenthal, a show called Somebody Feed Phil, very popular here in the US, he pitched his show as Anthony Bourdain afraid of everything. Then you’ve got Stanley Tucci, who I enjoy as an actor, but you start to look at all of this, and there’s a pattern here, and you really start to dig into the data, and then you start looking at the double standards. Women really get pushed on being safe when you travel, make sure you’re being safe, safe, safe.
Julia: And I agree.
Kelly: I mean, but that’s scared a lot of people off. When I talk to people about travelling, particularly women who are going to travel solo, they’re scared, I’d love to go but I’m too scared, I’m too afraid I’m going to get pickpocketed, I’m going to get robbed.
Julia: Sure, and that gets reinforced.
Kelly: But if you look at the data, it tells you something that’s really cool. Since post pandemic, there was a comparison, I think it was 2023 to 2024, Google searches for solo female travel jumped 131% from 2023 to 2024, and it’s each year keeping pace with that. So women are curious, women want to do these things, they’re curious about where to start, and I think increasingly we need to have more voices out there that say, you can do it.
Julia: And part of it is you have to see yourself doing it.
Evidence, Not Inspiration
Kelly: That’s the very reason we do our show, focused around experiences. First of all, I’m going to show you what an experience is, second of all, I’m going to share with you a story of a woman who’s doing remarkable things in the place you’re going to visit. So my encouragement to you is, don’t just default to a TripAdvisor list, go and find this chef, go and find this artist, go and find this experience. I’m not providing inspiration through our episodes, I’m providing evidence. This is the evidence that a woman in midlife can do these things, here’s your evidence, now go and get that trip.
Honestly, I spent, last year was when I left my corporate job for good, it was my thirty fourth year working in PR and communications, so I’ve been doing storytelling and stakeholder engagement my whole career. I find the term influencer laughable in most cases, because when you think about the power of influence, who are the people who are important to your success, but we’ve taken the idea of influencer and turned it into mass media through social, and I think, what are your qualifications. Seriously, most influencers in the food space, they’re glorified paid customer service reviews. One of our rules with our show, we never ask for anything for free, ever, wherever we’re filming I pay the tab, I leave the tip, full stop. Anytime they try to, I’ve lost the argument with two different restaurants where they said, nope, we’re comping your meal, and I said, no, I don’t want you to comp my meal, that is antithetical to what we’re about, you deserve to be rewarded for your story. I want people to understand why it would be important to come and see you, but the stories are remarkable, and women want their stories told.
Julia: Yes.
Kelly: Widely they’re not told, we don’t see ourselves in the stories, we don’t put a value on the stories, we overlook the women who have the most spending power right now in the world. So my mission is, I want you to watch one of our episodes and then go and find that place. I’m trying to build more things into this, go to Globe Thrivers, it’s a great app that literally pulls from social media, so we put all of our on location, this is an app created by an amazing woman, I’ll put the link in, it’s amazing. You can go on Globe Thrivers and every location where we’ve filmed our show, you can look at our itineraries, you can see the hotels where we stayed, the restaurants that are in the episodes, the art experiences in the episodes, and you can then click through and book it yourself. I want to stay in the lane where I’m good, which is the storytelling, but then I want our content to go to a place where you can easily click through and book an experience, or at least start to build a plan for yourself to go there one day. Right now we have itineraries for Spain and London.
Julia: The London one, I want to go back to London.
Kelly: Oh, but you could do London, you could just do London, you would never need to go anywhere else, you’d have enough stories to tell just in London.
Why Europe and North America Come First
Julia: I noticed that a lot of your focus is Europe based, is that intentional? How do you choose where you’re covering, what’s your thought process behind why you’re covering certain locations?
Kelly: Yeah, it’s intentional, but not to exclude. I needed to look at it from a business standpoint, how do I get this to grow, where do I start, with the places where I already have relationships. The model I have for the show is, I’m either travelling solo in the episodes, and I want you to see a solo experience, or I have someone joining me in the episode, and it’s another woman, usually someone who lives locally who I have in my network. When I decided to start building out this show, back to Mother’s Day 2020, I spent the whole day, my day off, doing all the research and starting to build a framework for what a women focused food and travel show would look like, because I was, excuse my language, thinking, what the actual fuck, where are all the women. My day started with, I’m going to watch some old episodes of Anthony Bourdain and dream about travel, and then I ended up angry instead, and starting to build a plan to do this.
Julia: Is that power, because you’ve got this power about you, do you think that’s a midlife woman’s power, that we just suddenly go, do you know what, I’m fed up of all this, I’m not going to take this any more, I’m going to go and do something about it?
Kelly: Yeah, I think so. First of all, I’d already been on this journey of trying to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, spending a lot of time in therapy, going back to that fifteen year old who went to London, who tried to stay there, and what did she actually want to do at age fifteen, and realising I didn’t go in that direction, I allowed myself to be influenced by so many other factors, people’s expectations of me, and so on. My whole adult life has, from one angle, been very successful, but when I look at it from the inside, I think, you haven’t done the things you want to do. So at that point in 2020, I was very much in that phase of experimenting with a lot of different things, having my own sandbox and starting stuff and then tearing it down, while I was still working in corporate.
This was the one though where I thought, this is where I’m starting to feel this connection between what I’m good at professionally, what I’m enraged about, what I’m pissed off about, and that third element of, how do I want to spend my time for the rest of my time on this planet. I want to tell the stories of women, I want to help women see themselves in midlife and beyond living, not just a menopause story.
Julia: Yes, because too much of the focus around midlife women is this story of menopause, which, don’t get me wrong, we all go through it and it’s not great, but it’s almost like that’s the only story, and there’s so much more.
Kelly: Right, there’s so much more to us, not to mention, at minimum, the spending power we have. So at that moment, when I started building out the plan for doing this, this is in 2020, we didn’t really get the show rolling until 2025, that’s when we really figured out the formula, it’s right for a twelve minute episode on YouTube. We’re going to keep it independent, I’m not going to waste my time shopping this to streaming services or other production companies, I’m going to do it myself. I’m a storytelling strategist, that’s been my whole career, I can do these things. But what did I not want it to be, I did not want to be an influencer, I did not want to try to grow my followers, I wanted to have stories that connect with women who are looking for evidence, who might be looking for inspiration too, but more so I want them to see themselves.
So moving into doing those episodes, starting last year, we did twenty eight episodes in 2025, and each of them is a story about a woman chef, a woman artist, showing you an experience. Now this year is where we’re really starting to accelerate that. So back to your question, it’s really anchored in North America and Europe, those are the easiest places for me to light up my network of women I’ve known over my career, to start to build these episodes. My dream is that I’m going everywhere, I have a friend from here in Minneapolis now living in Nairobi, her name is Sara Noor, and I want to go to Nairobi and spend time with her, I want episodes in Nairobi. I want episodes in Lebanon, I’m a quarter Lebanese and I’ve never been to Lebanon, it’s not a place to go right now, but I want to go to Lebanon and tell those stories, there are great food and travel stories to tell there, there’s a great wine story to tell in Lebanon, Lebanese wine can be fantastic.
Wine Stories from Bordeaux to Champagne
Julia: Have you done any wine coverage? I’ve started getting into some wine coverage recently, and I was down near Bordeaux just a couple of weeks ago, and met some fantastic women making some amazing wine, and most of the people I met down there, in fact I think everybody I met, were women, some of them doing some amazing things in the wine world.
Kelly: I think one of the things, so, short answer is yes, we have episodes we did out in Napa Valley in California. My former boss at Best Buy left and bought a vineyard, and got a winemaker’s MBA, and her place is now one of the most luxe experiences you can have for a wine tasting, it’s by appointment only, it’s amazing. There was another woman there who came out of the tech world, took her money from that and bought a vineyard in the Napa Valley area near Saint Helena, but she also owns a vineyard in Champagne.
Julia: Very good. You should do Champagne, you should mix Paris and Champagne together.
Kelly: We did two episodes at her spot, wine tastings, talking about her story and her journey, and then the second one, she brought over grapes and champagne she’d made over in France, and had the two bottles there, and we had this whole tasting, because there are two different formulas, it’s the same grape, everything is identical except one difference in the fermenting process. From a wine point of view, you could say the wine, whilst it’s the same grape made in the same method except for that one difference, isn’t the same, because they haven’t grown in the same, what we call in France, terroir, the ground they grow in and the climate they experience. When you get into the wine growers, they’ll talk about different parcels, different plots of vines, and one plot on the same estate will grow a totally different wine to another plot on the same estate, and they get very passionate about these differences.
Julia: It’s fascinating, when you start getting more and more into it, I’m finding there are more and more stories to be had there. I think Sharon Kazan Harris, who owns Rarecat Wines, needs to come on your show, I think you two would have a blast talking about this.
Kelly: We have an episode coming soon, right now we’re finishing up all of our Athens episodes, we’re dropping the second episode from Athens today, and that’s a tour of the Varvakios Agora market. I met up with, there’s this great organisation, okay, first of all, let me stay on wine and then I’ll go back and talk about this organisation you’re going to see in this episode. On the wine front, we did an interview in Athens at a place called Caravin Wine Bar, it’s owned by two women, one of them, Anna, was a pharmacist for twenty years, had her own pharmacy, Anna shuts down her pharmacy and goes and gets the sommelier certifications. So you have someone who is, for all intents and purposes, a chemist who has gone from medicine to wine.
Inside Athens: The Market, the Wine Bar, and Greether
Kelly: They have Caravin Wine Bar, it’s exclusively Greek wines, which was something I didn’t know, being in Greece for the first time, we don’t have huge access in the US, at least where I am in Minneapolis, to Greek wines specifically, a lot of ours are of course France, New Zealand, Australia, Napa. I didn’t know there were eight hundred varieties of Greek wine, I had no idea.
Julia: I’d say it’s not just the US, in France we don’t have any access to Greek wine either, there’s a very small section of foreign wine available, and most of what we have is French, with a little Italian and Spanish on the edges, that’s about it really. Greek wine certainly wouldn’t figure on the radar.
Kelly: Well, this experience, Julia, I think you need to go back to Athens, bring that eighteen year old girl back to the city, go to Caravin Wine Bar. What they do is wine pairings with all Greek ingredients, pizzas and pinsa, the Roman style flatbreads, and there’s one specific one you’re going to see in the episode, I remember the English translation, I want to say the Greek phrase for it correctly but I don’t have it in front of me, but the wine is called sour black, and it has notes of tomato vine and olive, which you’d think, ugh, for a wine, right. It’s certainly not a glass of wine you’re going to pour and sip on the deck at sunset, but they paired it with a pinsa that had mortadella and goat cheese on it, it was mind blowing, it was so delicious. It’s the pairing between two different things, it’s not one thing on its own, it’s the pair of food and wine together, that powerful explosion in your mouth of the flavours, it was so good, and I’m so excited to bring that episode to life, it will probably drop in later August.
The episode we’re dropping next is from a solo travel perspective, I’m in Athens, and what do we all love to do when we travel, we love to go to food markets, and Varvakios Agora is the largest market in Athens, literally a stone’s throw from where the ancient agoras are, from the ruins. So I thought, okay, we’re going to go here, it’s on all the TripAdvisor lists, you’ve got to go to Varvakios Agora, which is really interesting, because when you’re actually within Varvakios Agora, it’s all the butchers and the fishmongers, dead animals hanging everywhere, and I thought, really, this isn’t like the barefoot contessa going through the market in Paris, this is very almost industrial. But it’s on the TripAdvisor list, you should go here, and so I thought, I want a local’s perspective on this market, is this really worth the hype, and are there better, more local alternatives.
There’s this fantastic organisation called Greether, so it’s spelled like Greether, you say greeter but it’s literally spelled Greether, and it’s an amazing service, it’s been recognised by the United Nations Council on World Tourism, because what it does is it safely pairs women who travel with a local woman.
Julia: Oh my goodness, how amazing is that.
Kelly: She’s a young woman from San Francisco, and I’ve been following them on socials, really impressed with the whole idea.
Julia: Is this worldwide?
Kelly: I am paired with a woman named Anna, who is my greeter in Athens, and she’s Athenian, so she meets me at Varvakios Agora, she’s at the Greek coffee shop with a coffee and a Greek delight, like a Turkish delight, waiting for me, and we spend two hours together. We go through Varvakios Agora, which is again very industrial, but then we start going down the Spice Market street, and then through neighbourhoods, and finally we land in Kerameikos, I think is the name of the neighbourhood, and that’s where she lives, and we end up at her local market.
Julia: Totally different.
Kelly: She’s literally shopping for herself for the week, buying things to take back to her flat, and we’re there filming it, and I think, this is the idea, TripAdvisor will tell you to do the market, and this isn’t something you’d have access to. One of the things I find with a lot of travel shows, and Rick Steves does this, when I’ve seen his things, is they’ll show you places, but they’re places no one can get into unless you’re on the travel show, you can’t even get in there anyway, and they don’t make it clear that isn’t actually something you can go and do.
Julia: Well, yeah, I think that needs to be more clearly articulated.
Kelly: That’s different, that’s not a travel show. She’s going to have access to places you can’t get into, she’s going to be able to touch things you’re not going to be able to touch. There’s this breakdown, I think, that has largely been fuelled by social media, in terms of access and entitlement to different experiences that I just don’t think you should have.
Why She Will Never Film in a Restaurant Kitchen
Kelly: I’ll give you an example. Alex Laurie, who’s a consulting producer on our show, one of the things she’s telling us is, you need to get more shots in the kitchen. And I’m like, listen, I’m okay asking a chef we’re visiting to do an episode for my guys to go in and film in the kitchen, and we’ve done it in a few places, I try to be, I’m probably a little timid about it, because a lot of times when we’re there, it’s service.
Julia: Absolutely, interrupting service and being a pain in the ass.
Kelly: But you will never see me in the kitchen, never. Here’s why, my show is showing you an experience that you can have, I don’t want to set an expectation of getting into the kitchen.
Julia: Yes, I think that’s incredibly disrespectful to staff, the whole idea of chef’s tables in the kitchen where you can book.
Kelly: I know. I like an open kitchen, but I think that’s different. I think if you go somewhere, particularly if it’s an intimate restaurant, I’ve got a place for you in Porto, female run, this amazing woman runs a restaurant called emotivo, there are about eight tables and then the kitchen, and it’s an all female brigade, everybody starts the meal at the same time, and the chef comes and talks to you, and explains what you’re going to be eating, and the story about the different regions of Portugal and how it all ties together, and then she goes and cooks, but she’s there in your eyeline, you’re in this space that’s as big as my living room.
Julia: That’s amazing.
Kelly: Yeah, exactly. Her whole restaurant is this tiny little place, and that’s very different from a chef’s table where they’re serving other people, serving the mortals out in the dining room, and then you’re extra special because you’re in the kitchen. There’s a television show here in the US called The Bear, the final season just aired this past month, and I binged it, I love The Bear. To me, it’s actually more a show about mental wellness than restaurants, but in this final season, there’s an entire scene, part of a storyline, where they bring foodies into the kitchen because service is running behind and they can’t get them seated at a table, and they’re the most smarmy, you’re not a chef, stop trying to talk like you’re a chef, you’re entitled to be in this kitchen, can you not read the room, they’re really annoyed that you’re there.
I want us to be really honest about what we can and cannot have access to, and I want it to be something authentic. I don’t want it to be like what we’re hearing about Italy, where they’re suddenly putting women in the front windows, here’s the nonna making the pasta.
Julia: Oh, the nonna, the nonna pasta, they’ve shipped in a load of old women to pretend to make pasta in the window, it sounds like there’s something a little bit red light district in Amsterdam about it, do you see what I mean, I know it’s not sexual, but there’s something about selling this image that isn’t true, isn’t real.
Kelly: I think that red light comparison is really interesting, seriously, especially when we think about how women are valued.
What’s Next: Iceland
Kelly: I’m leaving for Iceland on August 9th, that’s our next filming destination, and I’m super excited for it. My Icelandic isn’t good, so I’m not even going to try to pronounce the names, but there are two women chefs at Fröken Reykjavík, and one of them is going to Bocuse d’Or in January, the final global competition, so she’ll be representing Iceland, and we’re going to be interviewing her and dining solo at her restaurant. We’re also going to, the artist Björk is hosting a rave on the twelfth, which is the day of the solar eclipse.
Julia: No, wow, that’s amazing.
Kelly: There’s a large amount of public art through Reykjavik that celebrates women, either by women artists or about women, so we’re doing a whole episode, a walking tour again with Greether. I’ve signed up for one, this is now going to change every time I travel, it’s changed my life, so we’ll have another episode with a greeter doing that. That’s also an episode where we’re going to have the Icelandic hot dog, I’ve just heard about it from the interview I’ve just done. There’s actually a chef here, a James Beard Award winning chef in the Twin Cities, her name is Anne Kim, she’s a pizza god, she was actually on a Netflix series, she has an episode on it, but she’s just put something out, she’s now making Icelandic hot dogs here in Minneapolis, so I thought, okay, I’m going to go to Iceland, have the Icelandic hot dog there, and then come home and try it here, compare.
We’re also going to snorkel the tectonic plates at Silfra, which we did for the first time, well, that was snorkelling, at Epidaurus.
Julia: You went snorkelling, you went scuba diving, did you, is it snorkelling or scuba diving, I saw that on Threads.
Kelly: Snorkelling, and that was amazing, this is also where reality doesn’t always live up to the hype. If you go on Viator, the booking service that’s part of TripAdvisor, I think Viator is actually quite cool, we booked this experience, and it was, you’re going to be snorkelling the sunken city of Epidaurus. It’s a sunken two thousand year old olive oil factory, it is not a sunken city, but of course they market it as, you’re going to snorkel a sunken city. It’s not quite as dramatic as that, but it was still really cool to snorkel it and see it up close. So yeah, we’re going to do the tectonic plates north of Reykjavik, I’m super excited for that, I’m a triple water sign, so anytime I’m around or near water, I’m blissfully happy. We’re going to do those entire episodes through the lens of solo travel.
I want to show the evidence that it’s okay to do these things, that it’s okay to go back to a place you’ve visited before. I was in Reykjavik for New Year’s Eve 1999, and it was a life shifting moment for me, because I came back from the trip, and within three months, I filed for divorce from my first marriage.
Julia: Oh.
Kelly: It was just, I was not where I was supposed to be in life, and so I made a big change after that.
Julia: That was a moment that made you realise, this is the power of travel.
Kelly: Travel allows you to see the world in a different way, with a different lens, and it changes you, there’s some alchemy that comes from it. Even as I’m doing these trips, I’m not travelling for a vacation.
Julia: No, there’s, when we’re travelling, it’s not a vacation. I want to come with you, and you’re like, well, I’m working.
Kelly: I’m deeply enjoying the experience, I’ve never had this much fun doing my job.
Julia: I hate you.
Kelly: This is a production. But I absolutely love it, and even doing it as a job, it still changes me, like I said, with Athens, I cannot stop thinking about that, and I cannot wait to go back.
Why the Same Ingredients Taste Different in Europe
Julia: Can we go back to you talking about comparing the Icelandic hot dogs with what you can get in the US, do you find that with other European food, because obviously I live in France, so I don’t know what you get in the US, I don’t taste your food, is there other comparisons where you find the food in Europe is different to the US version of it?
Kelly: Absolutely. There’s an episode we did in Valencia, Spain, in fact we did a couple of episodes in Valencia, one of them, and I don’t think it made the final cut, but I know we have the footage, where we’re served a simple loaf of sourdough bread. We’re at the restaurant, it’s called La Salita, Chef Begoña Rodrigo is a one star Michelin chef, and she talks in the episode about how she was running things for fourteen years.
Julia: Yes, I’ve seen it, it’s a brilliant episode, it’s powerful, in terms of what she had to go through to get noticed.
Kelly: Exactly. During that meal they bring out a loaf of bread, just a simple sourdough loaf, served with olive oil and salt, which is my favourite way to eat bread. My husband, I live here in Minneapolis, I’m married to a firefighter, he’s a very big guy, and he doesn’t really love to fly, he loves to go on these trips but getting there is a process, but he bakes bread as a hobby.
Julia: I think we might have the same husband actually, because my husband has a sourdough starter called Eric that’s lived for about three years now, and it literally has a sticker on the container that says finicky bitch.
Kelly: That’s my husband’s sourdough starter too. But we’re eating, so they bring out the loaf at La Salita, and I take a bite, and it is completely different, it’s the same three or four ingredients that go into a sourdough loaf back home, but it tastes completely different. That power shows up again, there’s another episode we did in Valencia, blood oranges, blood oranges in the US suck, they’re usually dry, it’s become a very popular flavour to put in waters and other things, but I’ve never had a really great one. Whereas blood oranges there, they’re the most orangey orange you can get, and they’re so juicy, the thing literally looked like it was flecked with blood, like a crime scene, and I thought, this is delicious.
The tomatoes in Greece, completely different, in fact, this is interesting, you’ll see it in the new episode, when we’re at our greeter Anna’s local market, there’s this beautiful spread of Greek oranges, and I went over to buy one and the vendor said, no, just take it, so he gave it to me for free. The peel was so stuck to the inside that trying to peel it open was just a mess, but it was so juicy, running down my arms, and I thought, sorry Spain, these oranges are better. There’s no comparison. When I think of what we’re trying to do in the US from a food standpoint, we’re trying to become more local in how we source things, we’ve been so commoditised and overproduced, our food system, so much is imported in from other places, we’ve really lost our way, I think, in terms of really appreciating what’s local to us, and eating local. There’s no way anything I’ve had in another country tastes like it does at home, it just doesn’t. I have a high appreciation for the culinary scene in the US, but there’s definitely a difference in the food, and my sense is that in Europe there’s more of an appreciation for eating local, not buying things in bulk, getting it the day you’re going to eat it, the appreciation for the farmers’ markets, we have them in the US too.
Julia: One of the things I’ve noticed, moving from the UK to France, is that the UK, whilst it’s in Europe, has an English speaking attitude which is similar to the US in certain things, and I think food is one of them, there’s a lot of pre prepared, prepackaged, industrial food in the UK. One thing I noticed moving to France was the seasonality, in the UK you can buy strawberries all year round, strawberries, melons, blueberries, they’re mad for them in the UK, whereas in France you get food when it’s in season, so we get strawberries when strawberries are in season, I can’t buy strawberries in November. I’m sure there are specialist shops and upper market places that ship them in, but in your standard market, or standard supermarket, if it’s not in season you can’t really find it. I think that food has been bred to grow in conditions it doesn’t normally grow in, so tomatoes have been bred to grow all year round, at the detriment to flavour, and the flavour has just been lost.
Kelly: Agreed, there is, I know there’s a scene in the new episode where I look down at this beautiful spread of tomatoes, and I say on camera, we get great tomatoes in Minnesota in August, and that’s about it, everything else is hydroponic, it’s grown without soil, in a lab, and so it lacks the flavour that it gets from the soil, from the minerals in the soil, from seeing the sun. That’s to me also why I think it’s so important to travel, because taste is such a powerful sense, and if your experience with a tomato is basically the bland ones you get at the supermarket, and you slice it and put it on your burger, and then you go over to Greece and have the tomato salad, we ordered the tomato salad every single meal we were there, and you taste those tomatoes, and it’s mind blowing, the difference, the flavours that come through. To me those are some of the best experiences, and that’s what I ultimately collect, I do collect art, in fact I bought a painting, it’s rolled up over there, I haven’t had it stretched and put on a frame yet, when I was in Greece, but I like to collect those experiences and those memories, and you can’t bring those home.
I don’t care, I’ve never understood the whole phenomenon of buying gifts for other people when you travel, I’m not going to use my luggage space for that. This is my gift to you, I’m going to give you these episodes.
Julia: Give something.
Kelly: That, to me, is the best gift I can give you.
Julia: That has been fantastic talking to you. I can’t wait to hear about your adventures in Iceland, and maybe you can come back another time and tell us all about how it went.
Kelly: I will come back any time you would like.
Julia: Thank you so much, Kelly.
Kelly: Thank you.
Thanks for joining me on the European Compass podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it with a fellow food traveller, and don’t forget to subscribe for more delicious adventures. Until next time, bon appétit and happy travels.
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