By Barry & Patricia Hilton, founders of CERU Restaurants

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being married to someone who cannot walk
past a market stall without asking the stallholder what his father did for a living. Barry will tell you it is
curiosity. I will tell you it has added, conservatively, four hours to every holiday we have ever taken.
Somewhere between Beirut and Limassol, we stopped calling it a flaw and started calling it a method.
We have built CERU on the food of the Levant — Turkey, Lebanon, Cyprus, Greece, Jordan, and the
wider Mediterranean beyond it — and we didn’t get there by reading about it. We got there by going,
again and again, usually with a battered notebook, occasionally with the Captain and Sarah in tow, and
always with the same rule: the holiday is not a rest from the restaurants. The holiday is where the
restaurants come from.
Every region has taught us something different, and none of it in the way a guidebook would. Turkey
taught us patience — the best meals there rarely arrive quickly, and rushing a Turkish breakfast is close
to a criminal offence. Lebanon taught us generosity, the sense that a table is never quite finished until
someone has brought out one more small dish “just to try.” Cyprus taught us simplicity, the confidence
to let two or three ingredients do all the work. Greece and Jordan, in their own ways, taught us restraint
— the discipline of not over-complicating something that was already right.

Finding the places worth eating at

The truth about finding good food abroad is that it is rarely where you’re pointed. Every guidebook in
the world will send you to the same six restaurants in any given city, and five of them will be fine —
competent, photogenic, entirely forgettable by the following Tuesday. The sixth one you find because
you followed a smell, or because a taxi driver told you where his mother eats, or because you got
hopelessly lost looking for something else entirely.
Our rule, for what it’s worth: ask three locals, not one. A hotel concierge will send you somewhere safe.
A shopkeeper will send you somewhere honest. A chef, if you can find one to ask, will send you
somewhere that matters. When all three names are different restaurants, go to all three. When all three
say the same word, drop everything.
It isn’t really the markets that have shaped us most, though the markets get all the credit. It’s the sheer
number of restaurants we’ve eaten in over the years — more than either of us could count, from tiny
family tables with four items on the whole menu to places grand enough to have a maître d’. The
inspiration from that is genuinely endless. And without fail, somewhere between the main course and
the bill, one of us will turn to the other and say some version of the same thing: how would we do this
better, what would we bring home for our guests. We can’t seem to switch it off, and we’ve stopped
trying to.

What we actually eat on holiday

People assume that because we run restaurants, we eat like critics — small bites, careful notes, a kind
of professional restraint. The opposite is true. On holiday, we eat like we’ve never seen food before.
Breakfast, if we’re in Lebanon, means labneh so thick it holds the shape of the spoon, olive oil that
tastes faintly of the tree it came from, and a version of manakish that has ruined every breakfast pastry
we’ve had since. In Cyprus it’s halloumi grilled until it squeaks, eaten standing up, before we’ve
properly worked out where we’re staying. In Turkey, Barry has a theory — unproven, much disputed —
that the quality of a town’s simit stalls tells you everything you need to know about the quality of its
restaurants. He has yet to be wrong, which is its own kind of annoying.
Lunch is the meal we take seriously, because lunch is when the markets are open and the produce hasn’t
yet been picked over. On that same Lebanon trip, we spent a morning at a small organic market outside
Beirut — trestle tables of tomatoes still warm from the sun, jars of makdous, a man selling nothing but
seven varieties of thyme — and came away with more ideas for CERU than we’d had in the previous
six months at home. You cannot manufacture that kind of research. You can only wander into it.
Dinner, more often than not, is fish, plainly done, somewhere with a view of the water we didn’t plan
for. There’s a place on the Lebanese coast, Chez Fouad, that does exactly this — the catch of the day,
grilled simply, a squeeze of lemon, and absolutely nothing else required. We’ve eaten more elaborate
meals in our lives. We’ve rarely eaten a better one.
Different countries bring different flavours, and different flavours seem to send Barry’s thinking off in
entirely different directions. Give him a plate with too much cumin in it and he’ll spend the rest of the
evening talking about spice balance on our winter menu. Give him something bright and citrus-led and
he’s suddenly redesigning a summer dish in his head, mid-conversation, before the plates have even
been cleared. I’ve learned to recognise the look. It means we’ll be testing something new within the
month.
I remember one trip in particular, in a small retro-style restaurant somewhere on the Mediterranean
coast, with a single yellow flower sitting in a chipped glass in the corner — the kind of detail nobody
else at the table would have noticed, but I couldn’t stop looking at it. The same evening, or perhaps a
night or two later in Greece, we were eating a salad with fresh figs in it, and I watched Barry go quiet
the way he does when an idea is forming. A week later, back home, figs turned up in one of our
desserts. That’s really how it happens for us — not in a boardroom, but at a table somewhere, over
something as small as a flower or a fig.

The other half of it — design

People tend to assume the two of us split neatly down the middle: Barry does the food, I do everything
else. It’s not far wrong, and design is where that “everything else” lives most happily for me. I have
always had a passion for it — objects, materials, the smell of a room before you’ve even noticed why it
smells the way it does, fabrics, textures, the weight of a chair. I could go on; I generally do.
Colour is a huge part of it, more than people expect. A particular blue on a tiled wall in Cyprus, the
faded ochre of a doorway in Jordan, the deep green of an awning somewhere in Turkey — I collect
these the way Barry collects flavours. And I won’t pretend otherwise: there is a genuine, slightly
embarrassing happiness that comes over me when I find something on a trip that I know, immediately,
we can bring into one of our own dining rooms. It’s a small thing, but it’s one of the most satisfying
parts of what we do.

Why it matters to us — and, we hope, to you

None of this is really about holidays. It’s about the fact that CERU didn’t arrive by accident — not the
menus at South Kensington, Hyde Park and Farringdon, and not the rooms they sit in either. They
arrived because we stood in a market outside Beirut long enough to buy things we didn’t know how to
use yet. Because Chez Fouad taught us, again, that the best food is usually the food with the fewest
excuses. Because somewhere on the Mediterranean coast, a yellow flower in a chipped glass mattered
enough to remember. Because a plate of figs in Greece turned, a few weeks later, into a dessert on our
own menu.
So if you’re planning your own trip through this part of the world — and we’d encourage you to,
wholeheartedly — don’t over-plan it. Leave room for the wrong turns. Ask the three people. Go back to
the place you loved even if it costs you the flight home. That’s not a holiday tip. That’s just how we’ve
always eaten.

Barry and Patricia Hilton are the founders of CERU Restaurants, an Eastern Mediterranean dining
group with three London restaurants in South Kensington, Queensway and Farringdon.