Greek Palace Delight at the Garden & Adelaide Fringe

For the Greek Palace team, working at the Garden of Unearthly Delights is more a homecoming than a humble beginning. Led by Xanthos Hatzimihail and Hellena Xandria, the mobile food vendor, specializing in Ancient Greek flavours, were serving crowds at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland and European dance revelers at Tomorrowland and Amsterdam Roots Festival before heading back home.

“Greek Palace started out in Adelaide only about a year ago, feeding festival-goers at music, arts and cultural events,” says creative manager Hellena.

“We transformed the nature of our traditional catering company and stepped into the unique creative whirlwind of festival foods, touring across Europe and expanding our business along the way,” she says.

Kicking off the Adelaide festival season in December 2012 with Summadayze at Rymill Park (where rapper MIA was just one of their many admirers), Greek Palace is now enjoying a month-long stay at the Garden of Unearthly Delights, right at home in front of the famous Big Top, finding fans in festival goers and performers alike, including British acapella group The Magnets.

“Festivals bring together thousands of performers and visitors from across the globe, for us it’s like running away with a different circus, every few weeks, all year round,” says Hellena.

Bringing their own spin on Ancient Greek charcoal cooking to the Adelaide Fringe, Greek Palace serves traditional Greek cuisine like yiros, baklava and souvlaki next to some admittedly more modern interpretations like the infamous “AB plate”. When it came to deciding a type of cuisine and theme for their mobile food vendor, they didn’t need to look further than their own Greek background.

“Greek food is one of the world’s most famous cuisines. We have over 30 years experience in serving our traditional taverna menu and the quality, flavours and unparalleled standard of every dish remains just as yiayia made it herself!” says Xanthos.

Greek Palace will be following their Adelaide Fringe stint with Future Music Festival and heading to the Coober Pedy Opal Festival in April, followed by a tour of Europe from May.

“We’re expanding into the US market by the end of the European Summer and hopefully we’ll fit in Canada too before the year is up, fingers crossed!” Hellena adds.

Be sure to visit Greek Palace at the Garden!