Like most teenagers coming of age, all Marianna Leivaditaki wanted to do was escape her surroundings. That meant getting off the Greek island of Crete. With a fisherman father and a mother who ran the family restaurant, chores ranged from hanging octopus off the clothesline to gutting fish and setting tables. And while she is head chef of Morito in London, the recipes and ingredients of her youth inform her first cookbook, “ Aegean .”
Chef Marianna Leivaditaki describes tomato and just the right amount of flour in fritters from her first cookbook. Photo courtesy of Interlink Books