SOME SAY
She can fire people’s imagination
“What really struck me immediately about Maria was her passion for food, not just for the act of cooking but also for the ingredients, the history and culture, and the medicinal properties of certain wild native herbs she incorporated in the dishes.”
- Maria is more than just a chef who teaches cooking techniques and recipes. On the contrary, she is self-taught. In two short years, she read 80+ books and experimented with forgotten recipes and ingredients in her kitchen. And so her culinary journey began.
- During her time as a chef, she persisted in her research and read nearly every book on traditional Greek cuisine. She is now a specialist in Greek cuisine.
- Ella, a chef from Australia, wrote about her: “I am a chef, and I teach cooking classes myself, but spending time with Maria really opened my eyes to a lot of new ideas about food I’d never thought about before.”
“What’s more, her personality, gift for teaching, love for what she does, and desire to share it with others make her classes a pure delight. On top of this, Maria is a very warm, gentle, but enthusiastic person to be with. She is also highly professional and committed. Her approach to the land and cooking is magical; it nourishes the soul as well as the body, and she teaches respect for the land. As for the food, the tastes are fresh, varied, and often unexpected. It is undoubtedly outside the mainstream of Greek cuisine.”
OTHERS CALL HER
a passionate, inspiring cook, a well-kept secret on Syros
Maria Krina is from Greece. She was born in Patras and got her degree in education in Chania, Crete.
After working as a teacher for some years, she decided she needed a change, and as she was already a passionate cook, she opened her restaurant in her hometown and worked as a chef and kitchen manager for 13 years. She specializes in Greek cuisine and has, over the years, acquired a deep knowledge of its philosophy, techniques, and history. She has been a pioneer in the organic food movement and holistic cuisine since 1998.
After 2011, she worked for 5 years as a chef and kitchen manager in boutique hotels and restaurants in the Peloponnese, Cyclades, and the Ionian Islands, taking over start-ups usually for one or two years. During these years, she also worked as a restaurant consultant on kitchen management issues (ergonomics, resource and staff management), as well as menus (composition, costing, and recipe teaching).
From May to October 2015, she made three presentations about Aegean traditional cuisine on Celestyal Cruises ships: the Celestyal Odyssey and the Celestyal Olympia.
An important milestone in her work with nutrition was the Healthnic Diet for Inclusion Erasmus+ project in collaboration with Vardakeios School of Ermoupolis in Syros, where she has lived and worked since 2013. This was one of the four best Erasmus+ projects of 2019 in Europe.
She created and led the project’s hands-on workshops, trained facilitators from participating countries, and helped write the guide.
Maria created “Cooking Tales, hands-on Greek cuisine” in 2014 and started educating people on traditional Greek cooking and nutrition for health and wellness using her degree and experience in education. Over the years, she has educated more than 500 people in her cooking classes and workshops.
Since 2017, she has been a vetted member of TravelinSpoon, a worldwide platform for culinary tourism, offering exquisite culinary experiences to her guests.
TESTIMONIALS
