Zorba’s Fine Greek Dining – Albuquerque, New Mexico (CLOSED)
“Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humor, and others, I’m told, into God.” ~Zorba the Greek The most obvious theme of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel Zorba the Greek is that life should be lived to its fullest–that its pleasures should be pursued with a lusty vigor. The embodiment of that attitude was the eponymous, life-affirming protagonist Alexis Zorba whose unrestrained joie de vivre didn’t diminish with advancing geriatric progression. If anything, Zorba’s exuberance and appetite for the pleasures of the flesh become more pronounced with age. His passions were governed by his senses, not by social mores or even his own intellection. In a sense Zorba’s attitude is encapsulated in Dionysus, the Greek god of the grape harvest, wine-making, wine, ritual madness and ecstasy. In the pantheon of Olympian gods, Dionysus may have been the most “human,” a god subject to mortal traits of impetuousness, irrationality and emotionality. His passions were expressed in such activities as dancing, drinking and eating. If there was a Greek god of revelry, drunkenness and inebriation, it, too, would have been…
