The garden and the cellar.

Behind the north wall: herb beds, tomatoes, capers on the dry stone. Below: the affinage cellar, cut into rock, where the wheels are turned by hand.

Cheese & affinage class

Affinage

Renaud closed an artisan cheese-maturing business in Lyon to come here, and spent three years working out what the rock under the house would do to a wheel. The answer, it turns out, is something between a Comté cave and a Cycladic summer — steady at thirteen degrees, humid, and smelling faintly of the thyme growing above it.

The first Sifnos-aged Beaufort came out of the cellar in 2023. It is on the menu most nights and in the shop when there is enough of it.

The garden

What grows

Tomatoes, aubergine, five kinds of bean, and more oregano than anyone has ever needed. Whatever the garden gives that morning tends to appear at the table that evening.

The capers

The dry stone wall grows capers whether we want it to or not. We pick and brine them in June and they last, roughly, until the following June.

The oil

The trees are not ours — they belong to a family in Vathy who press with us each November. The oil is theirs and ours in a proportion nobody has ever written down.