Leo Novak

On Crete I have a title, and it isn’t the one on my business card. I’m o xénos: the foreigner. In older Greek the same word also meant the guest, which is the better half of the deal.

I’m not Greek. My wife is Cretan, and Crete is her island; I learned it at her family’s table, slowly, and mostly by being corrected. I’ve spent more than twenty years in corporate tech, and years travelling around the island and the world, which is how an island earns its proportions.

Leo Novak is a pen name, and I’m telling you so here, so the name stays honest. Novak comes from the Slavic word for “new”: a newcomer, which is exactly what I am on this island. The name is invented; the claims on these pages are not.

I wrote Out of Office, a Mediterranean diet guide and cookbook: sixty-one traditional recipes from Crete and the rest of Greece, the history, and the honest science, written by a burned-out executive who learned to cook his in-laws’ food in a city kitchen. A second book, about protein the Mediterranean way, is in progress.

When a page here mentions the books, that’s me telling you about my own work, not a recommendation from someone else. See all the books.

I verify places before I write about them. I check hours and prices against official sources and date them, and where I haven’t been able to check something, the page says so. Nothing is included for payment. The full standard is published in the independence & ethics charter and the editorial manifesto.