Alex Scudamore

Alex Scudamore was born in Crete of Greek parents. For the past 25 years, he has lived in Malta and has been more or less single-handedly responsible for introducing the Maltese to Greek food. His very English surname – where does that come from? “A great-great-grandfather who settled in Smyrna after having had too much of the north of England,” Alex laughs. His parents took him to live in England when he was just a boy, but they determinedly kept up the Greek pattern. “My mother always cooked Greek food, even though the ingredients were not that easy to come by in Britain in the 1950s.” He joined the army and, as a young man, was posted to Malta. What were the odds that he would fall in love with a Maltese girl? He did, they married, and then they went off to set up home in England.

In 1980, with children in tow, they decided to move to Malta. Alex couldn’t get a work permit. In those days, ‘foreign’ men married to Maltese women didn’t have the right to work in Malta. Then, as sometimes happens when too many doors slam shut, what first seemed like an impossible situation turned into an opportunity. “I found out that ‘foreigners’ like me could get a work permit if they did something that no one else did here, so I asked myself – do I have any skills that the Maltese don’t have? And the only answer was: I can cook Greek food,” Alex said.

He opened Bouzouki, the Greek food restaurant in the very early 1980s, and he met with scepticism at first. “You wouldn’t think that Greece is in the Mediterranean and just a short flight away from Malta,” he says. “Greek food was so alien here that people treated it like something exotic and oriental. There were those who had a bad impression of it. ‘Oh, it’s really oily,’ they’d tell me, without knowing anything about it.” He stills gets the odd telephone call from potential clients, who before reserving their table take the precaution of enquiring what kind of food ‘Greek’ is. “Yes, they’ll ask me things like whether it’s eastern,” Alex says, “and I say, yes, it’s eastern Mediterranean.”