Through no fault of our own, we’ve been making rather a study of gut-busting meals on our travels. (Ok; perhaps we do bear a tiny share of the blame). We’ve had our share of Turkish breakfasts, and meze, and fish in Turkey. And we had an extraordinary, and extraordinarily expensive meal at Lysverket in Bergen. You’d think we’d have eaten our fill. But no: today we want to tell you about fish meze, a subset of the meze family. (Cyprus also features meat meze, which includes many of the dishes we covered in a previous post.)
We have now eaten this meal multiple times (once in Larnaka), enough that we feel confident in discoursing about its key elements. First, the title ‘fish meze’ is something of a misnomer. Not that there isn’t an ample quantity of fish: there is. But it starts with a huge spread of dips and breads, familiar to us from our meze-eating elsewhere. A giant salad with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, olives, and feta. Plus hummus, baba ghanoush, taramosalata, tzatziki, plus, often, pickled peppers or other vegetables, olives, and beets. Smart advice (that we never take) is to hold back; there’s lots more to come.
Then come the procession of fishes. More of these are fried than we would eat in the ordinary run of things, but we aren’t complaining. In Cyprus the fish meze features squid in several shapes, fried and sometimes alsobroiled. There is at least one other form of fried fish (in the picture below, three wee ones). Then there is, often, a shrimp dish, and a larger fish at the end, served with melted butter.
That seems to be the bare minimum. But we’ve also had mussels saganaki (amazing!) and several inspirational treatments of octopus. The one above was served at room temperature, as a salad, and we could eat it all day long, but for the fact that there were more fishes coming.
Also, as if it were necessary, sometimes there is dessert. Oranges or other fruit are ideal. But there is also a lovely thing, called alternately orange pie and orange cake, made with phyllo dough soaked in honey and orange juice and zest. It feels like you couldn’t possibly eat another bite. But then – at least if you are us – you do!
