Greek Specialties at New York’s Summer Fancy Food Show 2024

The 2024 Summer Fancy Food Show at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City seems to have recovered the losses of exhibitors during the COVID period, making it as large as (or possibly even larger) than ever.

There were exhibitors from all over the world, but I will dedicate this article to my thoughts about the presence of mostly Greek products at the show.

The great Greek writer, Nikos Kazantzakis, once wrote, “If you disassemble Greece, all that will remain will be an olive tree, a grapevine, and a ship.”

And at the 2024 Summer Fancy Food Show, even though no Greek ships were there, we saw lots of pickled olive jars, bottles or tins of high quality olive oil, tinned vine leaves, pickled vegetables, and other agricultural products. We also saw traditional dishes that are sold in cans or jars for home use or in plastic pails for restaurant use.

There were even some interesting frozen specialties like spinach pies or cheese swirls that I love, as making them from scratch is a difficult and time-consuming endeavor.

Since time immemorial, there have been many great Greek olive products exported initially throughout the Mediterranean, with Pharaonic Egypt a major trading partner, and eventually throughout the world. Olives and olive oil have been a major part of the Greek economy and gastronomy for a long time.

Olive oil is considered an integral part of healthy living, and I don’t think you can say you lead a healthy life unless you use lots of extra virgin olive oil in your kitchen. Actually, the “Mediterranean Diet” uses olive oil both raw and cooked as a primary vegetable fat ingredient.

OLIVELLAS from Halkidiki of Northern Greece exhibited a large variety of green (unripe) olives, as well as black-purple (ripe) olives either whole (with pits) or pitted, sliced, or stuffed and preserved in brine (in glass jars for home use or tins and plastic pails for restaurants). Some of the stuffed ones had plain almonds or almond, pimento, or jalapeño stuffing. Others were stuffed with citrus fruits like orange or lemon. Still others were stuffed with garlic, gherkins, or a mixture of pimento, chili, and jalapeño. All were very tasty.

They also private-brand these olives, so you might be purchasing them under a different name. No matter what they’re called, they’re excellent!

Minerva products (another Greek olive oil producer present at the show) are usually sold in either glass bottles or 3 lit. tins, which is what I get for my kitchen. Minerva was present in either the classic Green tin or the Horio (meaning village) version, which contains monovarietal oil only from the Koroneiki variety of Southern Peloponnese.

I use both versions in my kitchen, and both are great for salad dressing or to drizzle over a piece of feta cheese. But I prefer the green tin for cooking vegetable dishes like Imam Bayildi or Melitzanes Moussaka.

At the Loumidis Foods booth, I saw a number of brands that the company is importing from Greece. Loumidis has been known for their Greek coffee, packaged in green plastic/foil bags featuring a parrot. In Greece, it’s known as Papagalos Kafes, which means Parrot Coffee. I usually have it as an after-dinner indulgence or when I have friends visiting from Greece, as the traditional “welcome” sip.

Loumidis is importing a number of other well-known Greek brands, including the MISKO brand of Greek pasta, sea salt, wild-gathered herbs, olive oil, spinach pies, cheese pies, Agrino rice and legumes, Olympus hard cheeses, Lux fruit drinks, the Paliria line of tinned stuffed vine leaves, and beans and vegetables.

Even though there were many Greek stands at the show, there was a problem communicating with their personnel because there were few English-speaking attendants. So, I had to dust-up my Greek, which has become rather rusty, as I’ve been living and working in the USA for more than 55 years.

There were many other interesting stands that I visited from all over the world, but my time at the show was short. So there were just too many exhibitors. In a future article, I’ll describe some interesting products from India, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Turkey, Thailand, etc. that I tasted at the show.