Dimitris Raptis, the Prevezian cook, loves motorcycles and Greek cuisine, he will taste anything and stirs his smoked pots in the family cookshop that first opened in 1933.
“Cooking is the greatest thing in the world and Greek cuisine is the best,” he tells us behind the cookshop’s window that is his kingdom. His grandfather opened “Dimitrios Raptis Restaurant”, before the war, then his father took over, and now it passed into his hands. He learned the art of cooking in the kitchen. “I’ve been cooking since I was 20 years old, and I really enjoy Greek cuisine. I cook almost every traditional Greek dish that people eat at home. Gigantes beans, stuffed tomatoes, green beans, roast chicken with potatoes, soutzoukakia (traditional type of meat balls with origins in Asia Minor), fricassee, squid with spinach, everything.”
Dimitris might cook every dish, but he has a preference for soups, and for stews in general: from patsas (Greek tripe soup), first and foremost, to goat stew, to beef stew, and white lamb kapama (lamb stew with tomato and herbs sauce), which he makes without the tomato sauce, first boiling the meat with one onion and then just adding a sauce prepared with egg and broth from the meat, beef tongue soup with avgolemono sauce (traditional sauce prepared with egg and lemon). “It’s my specialty,” he tells us.
His cow head and feet soup is amazing, a unique recipe, a balm for the stomach, for real connoisseurs of Greek cuisine.
Do you only make meat soups here?
Of course not. I also make fish soup with flathead grey mullet, with sea bass, cod. I place the fish and seafood in the display. I also prepare baked sardines and anchovies, baked flathead grey mullet with potatoes and onions, cod with skordalia (traditional garlic potato mash), gilt head bream with celery, baked cod with raisins, leeks, carrots and lemon. But there are so many fish taverns by the sea for anyone who wants to eat fish. Here it’s a different story.
The local fish cuisine of Preveza, as Mr Raptis remembers it at home, includes luxuries like bottarga that was made (and still is) all over Preveza, since there are many flathead grey mullets, as well as unique dishes like pinna omelette that today no one makes. “Sinfully delicious,” he tells us, “especially with ouzo.”
Other dishes he remembers fondly from his childhood is the baked octopus with potatoes and red sauce, the mussels with macaroni pasta, the “blatsara”, a pie made with various greens and corn flour, and the wild boar stew that he also makes at the restaurant.
What do you like doing when you’re not working?
My great passion is motorcycles. I own a 1600 motorcycle and we’ve travelled all over Europe with my wife. The whole of the Balkans. I’ve been everywhere in Italy. And I really like Italian cuisine. After Greek. I tried tripa spaghetti in Sicily and it was amazing.
Do you eat out? What do you prefer?
I like the fish that I don’t really cook at the restaurant. I go to the seafront and eat fish and seafood at fellow businesses. They cook it great. To be honest, I’ll try anything, and I really like cuisines from all over the world, what people eat at home, what they enjoy. Mexican, Turkish, Armenian, anything. And I’ll go anywhere. At least once.
He gets up at 5 am, by 5.30 he is at the restaurant and he closes at 4 in the afternoon. “I cook everything myself. I don’t want anyone next to me. Cooking is a science. If something isn’t in its place, or there’s more of something or less of something else, the taste is ruined,” he says.
Cook Dimitris Raptis’ plans for the distant future are very clear: “I plan to eat every last spoonful of my life at the restaurant, and that spoonful will be of my cow head and feet soup that I’ll have prepared myself.”
Gilt-head bream with celery in a white lemony sauce – the recipe
Ingredients
4 gilt-head breams (300 gr each)
3 large celery stalks or 5 bunches of celery leaves
4 -5 large carrots
2 large onions + 1 medium onion chopped
8 large garlic cloves + 2 finely chopped garlic cloves
Juice from one large lemon
Olive oil for frying
Salt and pepper
Method
Scale and season the fish. Put them in a strainer to dry.
Wash and peel the vegetables and chop them into large chunks.
Keep the garlic cloves whole.
Boil the vegetables with 500 ml of water for 25 minutes. Take off the fire, remove the vegetables and let the broth cool.
Heat the olive oil (without overheating) and lightly fry the fish on both sides, with the medium chopped onion and the two thinly chopped garlic cloves, until the skin is slightly brown.
Add the vegetables and the lemon juice. Add about half a cup of the broth to the pan with the fish, to half cover them and shake the pan. Depending on how thick you want the sauce to be, you can add the remaining broth, add 1-1 ½ full tbsp of corn flour to the broth and stir really well until it dissolves. Put the pan on the stove again and add the broth and corn flour mix. Let the food simmer for 2-3 minutes while the sauce thickens. Serve immediately.
Read also:
Preveza’s finest delicatessen products
