One room, facing the working pier.

Vassilis Karavelas opened a single-room ouzeri in 1978, facing the working pier of the Alexandroupoli harbour. He had eleven tables, one pan, a charcoal grill he had built himself, and an arrangement with two fishermen who drank in the room next door.

The arrangement is the part that survived. Vassilis paid the boats before the auction did, in cash, on the pier, for whatever was best rather than whatever was cheap. In return he got first refusal on the morning’s catch. Forty-eight years later, three boats still hold that standing order and we still pay them on the pier.

The kitchen changes hands

Sofia took the kitchen in 2003, after nine years of being told she was not ready. She removed fourteen dishes in her first month and added none. The menu has been shorter ever since, and the board has been longer.

Her brother Yiorgos runs the front of house and, more importantly, the boats. He is at the pier at half past five most mornings and at the auction by seven. He chalks the board at eleven and posts the same list online at the same hour, which is the only concession to this century the room has made.

Two expansions

The room has grown twice, both times into the building next door, both times because we ran out of tables rather than because we wanted more. We seat seventy-two inside and forty under a vine on the terrace, and in August we still turn people away.

What has not changed

We make our own taramosalata, cure our own lakerda for forty days, pickle our own gavros in vinegar and oil, and bake the bread we serve. We do not buy from trawlers under seventeen metres. We open at noon, close in the afternoon, reopen at seven, and close one Tuesday a month for staff dinner.

We do not say “fresh”. We say “off the Aphroessa at six this morning”.

That is not a slogan. It is simply the only sentence that is true.