Two women who wanted to do things their way brought a taste of home to the lunch diners of Nicosia. And despite the difficulties of the times they have now expanded. AGNIESZKA RAKOCZY meets them
In the middle of the economic crisis, with Cypriot businesses closing down left, right and centre, a small Nicosia restaurant is not only thriving but has even had to expand to accommodate the growing number of people eager to lunch or brunch there. In any week, the Silver Pot offers its regulars a culinary tour of more than two dozen dishes guaranteed to excite the imagination and set even the most jaded taste buds a-tingle.
Whether it is Katsiki (slow roasted goat meat marinated in wild oregano and honey, served with crispy roast potatoes), Lebanese chicken salad (with eggplant, toasted pitta chips and pomegranate seeds, with saffron yogurt and fresh mint and pomegranate molasses dressing), crispy pork belly (with fresh greens, radiccio & aromatic apple and fennel slaw) or a salad (blue cheese, dried cranberries and fresh mango, with mixed greens, pistachios and fresh sprouts, with pomegranate molasses vinaigrette), every dish attests to the joyful creativity and palette-sensitive curiosity that drives the Silver Pot’s two-woman partnership.
Ianthi Sparsi and Meli Michaelidou, two divorced, working mothers, against all advice, defied common sense, quit stable public service jobs and set out to follow their dream three years ago.
It was a decision that has led the pair through many ups and downs since opening their small, regularly packed lunch spot on Nicosia’s busy Themistokli Dervis. While Ianthi and Meli acknowledge the stresses and strains of having to work harder than ever before they also find themselves going from strength to strength as they meet the day-to-day challenges of running a business founded on creativity and vision.
But Ianthi and Meli are not your average women. They have always gone against the tide and admit freely that they would not have it any other way.
Going back to the eight-to-five job? Forget it, they say.
“We don’t want to go back. We want to go forward. Already, we have the next three years mapped out and we are looking forward to going after and realising these dreams,” they say. We are sitting in the newly expanded Silver Pot, just reopened after a ten-day, hectic back-breaking revamping exercise.
Still, they admit that being women in the male-dominated business world of Cyprus is not that easy.
“Since we started we have heard so many things about why we should not be doing what we are doing,” says Ianthi.
She elaborates on the familiar litany. “We were told things like: women cannot be professional cooks; women have no business sense; this cannot be done; this is not how things are done. In one word, you name it… We have heard it all. Just persevering and insisting on getting what we really wanted and knew that would work for us has been a challenge because so many men here always know better.”
Both roll their eyes to the ceiling and shake heads and laugh.
Resolute and determined they may be but the struggle to complete the expansion within so asphyxiatingly tight a deadline has been stressful and exhausting and it is evident. The expansion itself stretched them financially. The race against time to complete the construction work and re-open the restaurant turned an already demanding schedule into a physically punishing 24/7 marathon.
As they juggled with practical and philosophical concerns about how the new configuration would effect both the system and the ethos of the Silver Pot, they also worried if they were doing the right thing by expanding. Was it a worthwhile risk to do this at a time when so many other establishments are facing closure?
But, according to a defiant Meli, the time was ripe for expansion and with the place next door just vacant, they just had to get on with it and seize the opportunity.
So they did. And now they are coping with readjustments, adapting to a new space while holding on to the hallmark intimacy of the original. And they will get there in the end. Why? Because if there is one characteristic that marks the way this indominatable duo operates it is their shared commitment to conceptualisation.
Ianthi and Meli think and rethink, evaluate and re-evaluate everything as they go along and then again once they put it into practice, until the ensuing system works like the proverbial perfect clock, every wheel and motion moving in perfect harmony.
This was the case with the old Silver Pot where until just a couple of weeks ago up to ten female staff flowed around the hub of the original tiny kitchen like professional ballet dancers.
They prepared tantalising dishes, made fresh, energising juices and explosive wake up espressos, and ferried food and beverages to tables while never once bumping into one another.
The same well choreographed dance is beginning anew in the refurbished Silver Pot under Meli and Ianthi’s watchful gaze as they analyse the flow and interaction of all the essential components in the larger setting.
The bigger kitchen, extended counter tops and an additional array of tables and chairs makes for a different stage and calls for a skilled director. Meli and Ianthi are quick to pinpoint the glitches in the system and do so with surgical precision.
“The main problem we have now is that the direction of the movement in the restaurant has changed so everybody has to get used to it,” says Ianthi. Her role during these initial post-expansion weeks is to be, literally, the overseer, to be everywhere but above all to be wherever a problem may emerge.
Sometimes, fine-tuning need not be quite so fine, Ianthi notes. “The till system is much more complicated now because we have two separate ones – one for the clientele eating in, the other for take-away. So it all needs some twacking.”
Meli, meanwhile, has a similar oversight role in the kitchen where she is in full charge. She is a bit more general about defining how Silver Pot works and what they are seeking to put in place but the dancing analogy readily applies. “It is all about rhythm,” she says.
Meli explains that for her and Ianthi the word holds a very special place in the Silver Pot lexicon.
But to understand that one has to go back to the beginning of the 21st century and envision Ianthi and Meli as two young women trying to find their place in what the nostalgic now define as the time of Cyprus’ golden economy.
It is a story not only of Meli and Ianthi but of an informal group of women unwilling to accept the prevailing conventions unquestioningly and anxious to look for alternatives.
“Quite a number of us were pregnant then and wanted to give natural birth but quickly realised that at the time something like that was not really an alternative,” says Ianthi.
So the women organised themselves and began looking into the matter systematically. They delved and persisted, until step-by-step they managed to accomplish their goal.
“And it was actually quite a mind-changer to give the birth the way you wanted, to have this control over your own body, and to see that you can say what you want and go for it and get it,” explains Ianthi.
The women went on to bring up their children together and to support each other as life moved on. Then, just as their kids were becoming old enough to be more self-reliant, the late Layne Redmond, doyenne of the ancient art of women’s frame drumming, made her first appearance in Cyprus.
Despite the demands of family and jobs, Ianthi and Meli found the time to attend one of Layne’s workshop. “It was our first week without the kids,” they recall. Soon they were hooked.
“It was empowering, it gave us freedom, it reconnected us with nature,” says Meli while Ianthi adds in that it was like reclaiming their own space and structure and rhythm in the universe.
“As you grow up you are thrown off balance and your natural rhythms get disturbed,” she explains. “Working with frame drums restores this balance and returns it to you. Creating this united sound with other women, you get a sense of power, you get a clarity.”
Both Ianthi and Meli, in their early 30s when they started drumming, soon began asking themselves where they were with their lives. Then came the even bigger existential question – where did they want to be?
Both stress how their husbands at the time were a positive support in all this. Yet both note too how in the course of the next five or six years, they grew apart. They were literally drumming their way out of a lifestyle, jobs and marriages included. They were having to confront a whole new set of questions and challenges about exactly where it was they were heading.
“By 2011 we were divorced, practically jobless,” Meli recalls. “I quit my job as a primary school teacher in 2009 and tried my luck as a natural birth couch supporter. Ianthi was struggling as a freelance editor and writer having left a secure job in the PIO years earlier. Finances were very limited.”
The idea of running their own restaurant was born out of this necessity, the realisation that both were good creative cooks and the general dissatisfaction they shared whenever they went out together for a meal since they always found themselves complaining about the quality and range of food being served.
It dawned on them that among all the franchises serving frozen fish and chicken and pre-packed hummus there had to be room for a lunch place where the discerning diner could enjoy a good home-made meal of fresh ingredients imaginatively combined.
The road from that eureka moment to the reality of today’s Silver Pot with its permanent staff of six plus additional part-timers as needed, proved to be long and tumultuous.
Finding the right location at an affordable rent and then design and construction took Meli and Ianthi six months. “We both had to feel right about it and it had to be within our budget,” they remember. They had to contend with “all this builders’ talk about how it should be done while actually we just knew what we wanted.” And, again, when it came to what they were planning to serve, there was a further barrage of (unheeded) advice about how it should be done and a seeming inability “to hear us out about what our concept was all about.”
And the concept that most of the free advice givers seemed incapable of hearing was simple in the extreme.
Ianthi and Meli wanted to cook just what Ianthi and Meli wanted to cook. They wanted to feature a menu that changed every day based not just upon the freshest ingredients available in the market that day but also, indeed primarily, that reflected their own feelings and instincts on the given day.
“We wanted to cook what we wanted to eat at home,” says Meli. Meanwhile, Ianthi, naming some of their international cooking heroes, cautions that following good recipes is not the be all and end all when it comes to creating their dishes.
“Sure, we have our favourite chefs and we regularly check their new recipes. For example, we love London-based Israeli Yotam Ottolenghi who, because of his origin, uses all the same ingredients that we have here in Cyprus. Then there’s also the Paris-based American pastry chef David Leibovitz and Joy the Baker from New Orleans.
“But sometimes we also create ourselves, like these baked peaches with blue cheese and bacon, which everybody liked so much when we trotted them out last week. OK, so we had these peaches and we wanted to do something with them so we did.”
Just as their recipes may change over time, have they themselves changed since that fateful opening day in 2011?
Back then, fearful no-one would come, they ended up serving the first Silver Pot classic they cooked to their own kids (Meli’s son and daughter and Ianthi’s daughters) and some of their closest friends.
“Yes, of course, we have,” they say.
“Ianthi stresses out easily and shows it but now she is a bit more in control of it. And I always had huge issues with time management but now because it is my internal discipline and not the one imposed on me by the outside world, the whole problem is finished,” explains Meli.
And Ianthi laughs and comments: “the great thing is that we have each other here and when one of us has a bad day and cries under the staircase the other knows how to step in and keep the whole thing going. It is like with our drumming – we have this common sense of rhythm.”
Perhaps there is a lesson there for us all.
