In her grandparents' kitchen, Andrea Fatouros found more than recipes. After years of infertility and loss, the founder of The Traditional Plate discovered that preserving her family's Cypriot heritage was also a way of healing herself.
Growing up in Matraville, Andrea Fatouros and her siblings had two options during school holidays: help out at their parents' Bondi Road Seafoods or sleepover at yiayia and pappou's house in Ashbury. They always chose yiayia and pappou.
Choosing yiayia and pappou meant choosing adventure and Pappou Savvas was full of them. He'd take them berry picking near Goulburn, searching for mushrooms in Oberon, on road trips that felt like expeditions. Foraging for food became what they did on weekends, returning to yiayia Andriani's kitchen where everything they'd gathered would transform into meals, jams, memories. When yiayia made traditional trahana, the fermented wheat soup dried in the sun for three days, the children had jobs: flipping the shaped grains so they dried evenly, chasing away birds, shooing off cats.
"In our own way, we became masters of sun-drying trahana," Andrea recalls. She has fond memories of being in her yiayia's garden, in the kitchen with her, moments whose significance she may not have understood at the time. Years later, those same memories would steady her during the most difficult chapter of her life and each recipe she captured would carry a piece of her family’s story.
When The World Feels Too Much, Yiayia's Kitchen Awaits
After the birth of her first daughter, Diana, in 2015, Andrea and her husband Bill spent the next eight years hoping for a second child. The journey was relentless. Andrea endured multiple miscarriages, a diagnosis of stage five endometriosis that had spread across much of her body, and seven surgeries between 2019 and 2024 - three of these occurring in a single year alone. In one operation, doctors removed her fallopian tubes, a decision she only discovered upon waking. With natural conception no longer possible, IVF became her only hope. Three rounds ended in heartbreak.
"Sometimes I just wanted to sit down and have a coffee and cry," she says, "and I would do that at my yiayia and pappou's house because it was my safe place. It became my sanctuary."
During those years, Andrea turned to her yiayia and pappou’s home, which became her haven. In their kitchen she found comfort and healing through fresh produce from the garden, heartfelt conversations, and the kind of hugs that made everything feel lighter.
Over time, she realised the comfort she felt wasn’t only in the food itself but in what it represented: resilience, love, and the traditions her grandparents carried with them from Cyprus. Their table reminded her that food could be more than nourishment - it could be a way of holding on to family, memory and identity when everything else felt uncertain.
"Those moments made me realise that food is more than simply just food," she reflects. "It's memory, it's the connection, it's the legacy that comes with it. And I never wanted the feeling of how I felt at yiayia and pappou's house to fade."
So in mid-2019, Andrea started The Traditional Plate. She began recording recipes, but what emerged was something much larger: an archive of flavours, voices and memories that told the story of her family’s history.
Every Dish Tells a Story
"I only began to truly understand my family's relationship with food when I started recording recipes with them," Andrea says. What she discovered was that each family member's approach to cooking was shaped by their own experiences and that through their recipes, she was also uncovering their stories. Food revealed not only flavours but perspectives, memories and the different ways her grandparents and parents had lived their lives.
Her grandfather, Pappou Savvas, is methodical in the kitchen, patient and deeply creative. He makes traditional fasolada, but also his own invention: fasolada in a red sauce with crispy bacon and sautéed onions. "When I was a kid and still to this day, I think it's the best thing I've ever eaten from his kitchen," Andrea says. His creativity came from opportunity – as a cook in the army, he had the freedom to experiment, inventing dishes that would keep soldiers both satisfied and sustained. "If I had to choose the best cook in the family, he’d be right up there," Andrea adds, "because his food is always so full of flavour and imagination."
Yiayia Andriani’s story is one of resilience. She lost her mother at a young age and, as the eldest of six in Cyprus, took on the duty of caring for her father and siblings. For her, food was never about luxury but survival, about making sure there was always something on the table. “To this day, she’s only ever taught me to make baklava spirals,” Andrea says. “She’s never taught me how to bake a cake or make a dessert. And I think that comes from her relationship with food. It wasn’t about indulgence but nourishment and responsibility.”
When Andriani makes pourgouri, cracked wheat cooked like rice, it connects directly to her past. In Cyprus, wheat was plentiful and pourgouri became the alternative to rice: hearty, filling and sustaining for long days of field work, often eaten with grapes picked straight from the vines. Even now, she holds that role of keeping everyone fed and cared for.
Andrea’s father carries memories that he rarely speaks about. One afternoon at her parents’ property in the Southern Highlands, Andrea filmed him and her grandfather Savvas picking prickly pears, teaching her how to harvest them without cutting or picking herself. The fruit stirred something deep - memories of his garden in Cyprus, of the abundance before everything was lost. For the first time, he began to share what it meant to be sixteen during the Turkish invasion. He told her he took only one thing from his bedroom: a trophy from a race he'd won in his hometown. It still sits proudly in the wall cabinet in his house today.
"Did you know what was going on?" Andrea asked him at the time.
"I was sixteen, of course I knew what was going on," he told her recounting how thirty people at least crammed into an old Range Rover that night, its wires sparked to life by the local mechanic, Cypriot soldiers clinging to the sides as they escaped south.
“He had never told me that story before because it’s not something he commonly talks about,” Andrea says. “I would never have known if we didn’t have that moment with the prickly pear.”
Yiayia Kalisteni, Andrea’s paternal grandmother, passed away before Andrea was old enough to truly appreciate the gift of her cooking. She was an incredible cook, and Andrea still chases the taste of her recipes. After hearing her father’s story, Kalisteni's flavours took on new meaning for Andrea.
Kalisteni would either prepare the humblest peasant dishes - black-eyed beans or fasolada made with extraordinary care - or she would go all out with trays of pastitsio and gemista. Andrea’s favourite memory is of Kalisteni’s chips fried with onions and olives added at the end.
When the family started over in Australia, the first things they bought were not beds but forks, knives and plates - the tools to make a house feel like home through food.
"I can never fathom what they went through, but my gosh, it's those stories that I'm so humbled by," says Andrea.
Cooking Me to Mati (By Feel)
When Andrea started taking The Traditional Plate seriously, she tried to measure everything, writing down quantities so she could share exact recipes.
But the older generation all cook 'me to mati', or 'by feel', Andrea explains.
"Yiayia is so old school she doesn't have recipes, it's all in her head. She's cooking with her senses," says Andrea. "The feel of the dough, tasting food, listening to the sound of the wood fire crackling to know when the oven is ready for bread. The older generation are completely immersed in this sensory experience around food."
"Meanwhile I was trying to record recipes and I needed to know measurements," Andrea says. "How many tablespoons am I doing here? It changes the flavour. I need to know exactly!"
But she eventually put it in perspective. "I'm not going to be able to change them. They've been cooking for generations and it's just so unfair to change something they love so much, which is cooking, into this methodical way."
She realised that no two dishes were ever the same. Each time she cooked with her grandparents the measurements shifted, the ingredients varied, the quantities changed and that every family had its own way, its own allusive flavour. That was the point.
“This is how we’ve been cooking for generations,” she understood. “I don’t need a recipe, I just need to learn to trust myself.”
Her content shared on The Traditional Plate started being more natural and at times she records her frustration at not being able to get the measurements right. Yet despite this, and some followers also expressing annoyance at the imprecision of the recipes are me to mati, Andrea has continued to champion her notion that food is about stories and cooking with instinct. It's a principle that she carries into her cooking classes, which she begins by saying, "I want you to cook with your instincts. I want you to feel what you make."
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From the Kitchen to Instagram and Beyond
Over the past five years, The Traditional Plate has grown far beyond Instagram. Andrea has collaborated with brands including Harris Farm, Sergio's Cake Shop, and Antoniou Fillo Pastry,. For Antoniou, she filmed a special segment alongside her pappou Savvas and his sister Panayiota, who lived next door in Ashbury and was the family baker of Andrea’s childhood. Together, they showcased how to work with fillo, making titsiropita - a nod to the recipe theia Panayiota had perfected over decades.
Alongside these collaborations, Andrea has been steadily building her program of live cooking classes, into which she often brings members of her family with her, recognising that The Traditional Plate was never hers alone but the legacy of many hands. At one of her cooking classes at Rose Bay Church, for example, yiayia and pappou joined her to teach the youth how to make bourekia, the famous cheese pastries.
In Robertson, in the NSW Southern Highlands, Andrea also runs regular classes at Moonacres School, teaching traditional recipes that connect back to her grandparents’ garden and table. For her upcoming class on 1 November, she plans to take things a step further -transporting a souvla, the traditional Cypriot charcoal barbecue all the way there from Sydney. Instead of thinking that the logistics of such a grand plan were too difficult, her pappou came with her to measure the space and simply said, “Why not?”
It's the same adventurous spirit from her childhood, when he'd take them berry picking and mushroom foraging. Pappou is always willing to support her ideas, no matter how wild they seem.
SBS Food Safari - A Full Circle Moment
Over twenty years ago, Maeve O’Meara filmed an episode of SBS Food Safari at Savvas and Andriani’s home, capturing kleftiko in the wood-fired oven and yiayia’s famous bourekia. Andrea was about ten or twelve at the time, and she remembers the thrill of the day - even managing to sneak in her first sip of ouzo with her cousins because everyone was in a celebratory mood.
Earlier this year, Andrea bumped into O’Meara at a function. They reminisced about that original shoot, and not long after, O’Meara joined her for coffee at her grandparents’ home, where the idea for a new gourmet Greek Food Safari began to take shape.
That idea has now come to life. On 18 October, twenty-two guests will tour Greek and Cypriot institutions such as Dulwich Hill Meats and boutique winery, Miloway Wines before returning to Savvas and Andriani’s kitchen for a traditional lunch with cooking demonstrations. Tickets sold out almost immediately.
"Yiayia and Pappou really love the company," Andrea says. "They would always be keen to feed everybody."
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Home is Where Yiayia and Pappou Are
When learning that the fourth round of IVF had succeeded just over two years ago, Andrea called her grandparents before calling her husband. "They were such cheerleaders for me, always rallying for me," she says. "It was a really emotional moment."
Baby Anthia arrived in 2023, and now twenty-two months old, she reaches for flour in her great-grandmother's kitchen while ten-year-old Diana rolls dough for bourekia better than Andrea can.
One day, Diana brought home a school artwork about comfort food - hers showed avgolemono, the egg and lemon soup that for her means warmth and care.
"Just as I have food that gave me comfort when I was growing up, she has her own dishes that evoke emotions for her and feelings of being safe and nurtured," Andrea says. "As much as I want to preserve the traditions and the culture and the recipes, I want to be able to preserve the feeling that food gives. Especially at yiayia and pappou's house. The feeling of food and the comfort of it, and the stories behind the recipes."
The Traditional Plate has over 17,600 followers now and growing. Messages arrive constantly from around the world: "That reminds me so much of my yiayia and pappou," or "I haven't seen this dish since my yiayia passed away."
"I am the lucky one, being able to do this," Andrea reflects. "I'm still grateful that I have my yiayia and pappou, my daughters have their great-grandparents, and we can still have these fond memories around food, around the kitchen table, which is what it's all about."
"That is probably the best thing that's come out of The Traditional Plate," she says. "Understanding my family."
In the Ashbury kitchen where a young Andrea once stood on tiptoe to help her grandparents cook, the fire still burns, the dough is still worked by hand, and the recipes brought from Cyprus are made just as they always have been.
“Having four generations in the kitchen together, cooking, those are the moments that are most memorable for me," Andrea says about the way her family continues to come together sharing food and stories that bind them. Through The Traditional Plate, Andrea continues, not only to show how something is cooked, but to capture why it matters - the taste of her childhood and the feeling of walking through the door of her yiayia and pappou’s house.
As she says simply: “For me, my grandparents' house is where food truly feels like home. I always say their home is the best restaurant I've ever known."
For more stories and heart-warming recipes follow @the_traditional_plate
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