Coober Pedy. In the local Aboriginal dialect it means ‘White man’s hole in the ground’. And there’s a reason for that: the 2700 miners who call ‘the Opal capital of the world’ their home reside on top of, around, and often underneath the conical mountains of white waste-soil from earlier generations. This means that million dollar finds are often attributed to hollowing out a bedroom.
But while it’s easy to spot the toothless old-timers noodleing in the piles of dust at the side of the road, the open mine shafts in the middle of town, and the many 4-wheel drives rushing explosives to hidden claims out in the ruined dessert, it’s a little more difficult to spot a more basic cultural phenomenon: Almost everyone in Coober Pedy seems to be Greek.
In a town large enough to support four restaurants, two are greek, one is Serbian, and the other one is a pizza place that also serves Greek food.
Zaf and amg had just trudged in from a hard day excavating in the mines with pickaxes and an animal-hide bucket*. They craved a big chunk of cow, or at least kangaroo. There was only one place to go: Tom and Mary’s Greek Taverna, noteworthy both for its inexpensive meals and for the fact that the road to it is paved.
I’m not sure who Tom and Mary were but the actual owners are Anastasios and Maria Klosses. They’ve been cooking in one location or another since they arrived for the second opal rush 15 years ago, and unlike most of the town, this incarnation of the taverna is built above ground. Huge feta and olive salads, fabulously aromatic lamb, and grizzled old men with beards down to their belts and steel-toed workboots knocking back unlabeled beer like they don’t want to live, all combine to give the dining room a really cosy feel.
We tried the all-meat platter and smelled it even before it came out of the kitchen. There were patties of spicy ground meat patties, huge lamb chops, huger pork chops, a steak, and an unbelievably juicy lamb kabob. Non-meat additions included tzatziki, another olive salad to ward off scurvy, and a mass of boiled potatoes bigger than the Devils Marbles formation just 1000 K up the highway.
Tom and Mary’s is a welcome retreat from the dusty scrub-desert where more dentally-challenged locals wait to buy or sell you opal. Its also one of the few places in town not covered in warning signs never to walk backwards when taking a picture. We were even given an entire pitcher of free water which is apparently something of a luxury out here. The whole meal was inhaled with serious gusto. Mining** can do that to a person.
*Driving around in a rental car being tourists
**More driving