April 03, 2023 - - Wine shop - Restaurant | No comment
In the spring of 2020, éla! began as a project led by Will Sapp on the Greek island of Patmos. He leased a century-old cottage and 2 acres of forgotten farmland. Mindful of the island's agricultural heritage, Will planted thousands of vegetables and fruits in the sedimented soil, and re-designed the living room of the cottage into a wineshop selling a collection of small natural wine producers from Greece, Georgia, and Western Europe.
Quickly gaining the reputation amongst the locals as ‘the crazy Canadian lawyer who was gardening and selling natural wine’, Will wasn’t deterred, the terrace was transformed into a restaurant with an outdoor grill built from Patmian stone. The menu the first summer sourced only from the earthly delights of the island. There was no sign to the restaurant, only a winding road, some tea lights, and word of mouth. In mid-July, just a few weeks after opening, Tess, a writer from New York, made her way down to the garden and was soon convinced to stay…
Two years later, éla! is run by Will and Tess. They travel around Europe in the off-season looking for likeminded people, weaving a community of artists, gardeners, chefs, writers, and makers. Open from June to September, éla! is a natural wine bar and farm-to-table restaurant.
Every person who enters éla! is taken into the century-old Patmian cottage wine shop and told stories of the winemakers, the daughters who wade in wine up to their knees and then stomp all of it out, toes dripping wet with juice. It is the stories and labels that lead people to their bottle of choice.
The food specials are written on the chalkboard daily, including cheeseboards with local graviera's and homemade apricot jam, sourdough cichetti's with roma tomatoes from the garden. éla!'s kebabs are also famous, with chickens sourced from a neighbouring island always on the spit, roasting slowly and surely. This summer, there will be a program of international chefs from Thailand to Turkey, experimenting with the vegetable garden and foraged ingredients.
One word: paradise.
