Boutari

Above: Chef Psilakis’s “Octopus and Chickpea Salad,” featured in the Wall Street Journal.

For Michelin-star celebrity Chef Michael Psilakis (Anthos, NYC), the Boutari winery “embraces the soul of Greek wine, and interprets and elevates it.”

From The Washington Post:

“Typical,” Psilakis says as he winds his way past fresh seafood, vegetables, local honey and touristy T-shirts in the central market of Heraklion, Crete’s largest city. He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. “This is so Greek.”

Psilakis, 40, is one part irritated but two parts amused. He has spent his entire professional life evangelizing about and explaining Greek food, so anything typically Greek, even a typically Greek mistake, gets a pass. His haute establishment Anthos is the only Greek restaurant in the United States to have received a Michelin star; his more rustic Kefi helped establish Manhattan’s Upper West Side, long a culinary desert, as a dining destination. This past spring, he was invited by the White House to cook for a Greek Independence Day celebration. Now Psilakis has a new cookbook, “How to Roast a Lamb” (Little, Brown, 2009), that tracks his culinary development from the souvlaki and cheese pies called tiropitas he watched his mother make when he was growing up on Long Island to the smoked octopus with fennel puree and lemon confit that is a signature dish at Anthos.

Click here to read the entire article.

Above: Stelios Samaras of the Boutari Winery, left, with chef Michael, center, and chef Harris Salakis, right.