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EATS & DRINKS
Poseidon Bakery
629 9th Ave. (betw. 44th & 45th Sts.), 212-757-6173
The Poseidon Bakery in Hell’s Kitchen was empty when I arrived. "Just a minute!" shouted a disembodied voice from somewhere in the back. The owner of the voice, Lili Fable, shuffled to the front of the store, smoothing her apron.
Lili has been at this bakery for the past 43 years, almost as long as she has spent married to Anthony Anagnostou, the third-generation owner of this 80-year-old Greek institution. A vivacious woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a radio-quality voice, Lili, 16, visited a 21-year-old Anthony at the bakery back in the day; his father would unfailingly greet her with a slice of baklava and a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
"I gained 10 pounds," said Lili, her eyes widening. "I said, ‘I have to stop coming to see you.’ And he said ‘Why? why?’ And I said, ‘Because your father won’t stop feeding me!’"
Fortunately for Anthony, who has since retired (he recently passed the business down to his son Paul), his "Lili machine" didn’t make good on her promise. Her presence, as his nickname suggests, has been very good for business. When Anthony would sell his phyllo dough to the erstwhile Silver Palate, the owner was amazed by how quickly Poseidon Bakery could fill their orders for spanakopita, a traditional spinach pastry.
"‘What machine do you use?’ she asked me. I said, ‘The Lili machine.’ She asked me ‘What’s the Lili machine?’ And I said ‘Lili is my wife.’"
But Poseidon’s real claim to fame is it’s the only bakery in Manhattan that still makes phyllo–the paper-thin dough used in sweets like baklava and countless other Greek pastries–by hand. Making phyllo dough is essentially a magic trick: watch them turn round balls of dough into parchment-thin sheets. This feat is accomplished by gradually tossing, flipping, pulling and prodding the dough until it covers the surface of a large rectangular table.
"You go to all sides of the table and stretch out the dough," explains Lili. "This is what the Greek ladies did in their homes. Sometimes they even used their beds."
According to Anthony and Lili, homemade phyllo doesn’t taste any different than the machine-made variety. The former is made without preservatives, has more elasticity than machine-made phyllo (which tears easily) and bakes to a deeper golden color. Poseidon makes fresh batches four days out of the week, making 40 to 50 pounds per day.
"I used to make 100 pounds a day," says Anthony, still strong at 69, still lugging around heavy pans and vats of water.
Today, the Lili Machine is spending her time running between the back room, where a batch of pineapple cheese strudel is in progress, and the front, where a noisy buzzer communicated the arrival of a retail customer.
"Okay, almost there, almost there–" Lili hollers, putting down the brush that she’s been dipping in butter, then dashing out to the front–"Hello!"
