Ella Mittas’s Cookbook Documents Greek Travels And Kitchen Time

Halfway through Broadsheet ’s interview with Ella Mittas, there’s a knock at her door. She promises to be quick, and darts out. “My old neighbours came past,” she says smiling on her return. “They’ve got a new baby and they’re showing everyone in the apartment block.” Cue delight.

The Greek-Australian chef and author’s travels and kitchen time – in revered venues like Brigitte Hafner’s Gertrude Street Enoteca, Annie Smithers’s du Fermier and Yotam Ottolenghi’s Nopi in London – drive the vibe of her pop-up events and private catering. Along with introducing their new arrival, her neighbours returned an old cookbook of Mittas’s. “I live in an art deco building, and during Covid we all hung out in the court. Before that I didn’t know any of my neighbours, but now we’re quite close,” she says.

Shared homey experiences like these form a golden throughline in Mittas’s debut book Ela! Ela! (“Come! Come!” in Greek). And come the people did. Released as a self-published project in 2022, the 1500-copy run was a sell-out success. “I absurdly did think it was going to sell out,” Mittas laughs. “I have a strange combination of being quite ambitious but being kind of self-deprecating.”

In the book, transportive essays on travel and chapters of family-style recipes are magicked up with Mittas’s textural photography. Sardines glisten in a pool of golden oil. Sun-weathered hands pass plates across dressed tables. There are deep blue oceans and craggy mountains.

Connecting to others through food is to be expected of a chef, and Mittas’s writing is ripe on the page. Murdoch Books caught wind of the book and is about to publish a second edition. There are a few more recipes, and a new terracotta-hued woodcut image (by Mittas herself) on the cover. But the rest remains the same: tales of hot syrupy nights in Istanbul, brash kitchens and culture clashes. Cigarette hazes and markets full of unfamiliar produce.

Regional specialties dictate travel plans. The thought of foraging wild greens takes Mittas to Alacati, a coastal Turkish town with Grecian flavours. Stories of Greece’s best food being found in Crete take her to Drakona, where hand-cut chips are fried over an open woodfire. “I could go overseas and work in these kitchens, but it’s quite a direct experience of culture – you’re working with everyday people, they’re speaking another language.”

“The project’s been a question of culture,” Mittas says. “I love witnessing or experiencing a new culture, and then I love documenting it.” In search of a “more-real” expression of her own Greek heritage, Mittas’s explorations took her from Melbourne to Turkey to Greece.

“I think it’s a very common experience to be looking for culture outside of your family,” she says. “I was constantly going to Greece to look for this identity that I thought would be in Greece … but I realised that it’s in Melbourne. That’s what the book is about: me going overseas and being like, ‘There must be a place where there’s more culture than what we have in Australia’, and realising I was imagining a fantasy culture somewhere else.”

As a Greek-Australian living in Melbourne, there’s a specific melding of flavours and family. “[This] family setting is a very particular mix of being Greek and Australian that doesn’t really exist in Greece. A lot of my photos seem to be about that as well: you know, Greece in Australia, what does it look like?”

Her favourite photo in Ela! Ela! hints at one scene. “It’s at my pappou’s house [in Melbourne], of a table that’s covered in a lace tablecloth. It has plastic over the top, and on the table is a bottle of ketchup and a plate of feta. It’s this perfect mashing of cultures. Things like that, I love them so much. They’re nostalgic for me even when they’re happening in the moment.”

Ela! Ela! is out now through Murdoch Books.

This article first appeared in Domain Review, in partnership with Broadsheet.

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