Arriving at the Fall Equinox to open our holiday season, XENIA is at once an exploration of botanical flavors and medicines, and an invitation to practice its most enduring wisdom: come to our table, welcome the stranger, and taste antiquity.
With its sweetness derived only from dates and dried fruit, XENIA is deliberately less sweet than our other creations, allowing the earthy jamminess to speak with unusual but harmonious clarity.
XENIA is our meditation on The Odyssey’s sacred law of hospitality, and an expression of the enduring Golden Rule that echoes across civilizations. Inspired by Homer and our study of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, we composed this truffle-style bar almost exclusively from ingredients available to the Mediterranean world during Homeric times, with one deliberate anachronism: cacao, our own contribution to the ancient table.
A dense jam of smyrna fig, pomegranate, raspberry, grape, and fennel pollen meets our leptokarion-itrion crème, inspired by the ancient sesame preparation but made with dates instead of honey - with sesame, hazelnuts, and olive oil, then finished with Adriatic salt and precious filaments of saffron.
With its sweetness derived only from dates and dried fruit, XENIA is deliberately less sweet than our other creations, allowing the earthy jamminess to speak with unusual but harmonious clarity.
Arriving at the Fall Equinox to open our holiday season, it is at once an exploration of botanical antiquity and an invitation to practice its most enduring wisdom: come to our table, welcome the stranger, and taste antiquity.
INGREDIENTS: raw cacao beans*, ground dates*, Smyrna figs*, raw hazelnuts*, raw sesame seeds*, raw cashews*, Corinthian grapes*, pomegranate*, raspberries*, extra virgin olive oil*, Adriatic sea salt, fennel pollen**, saffron**, Love.
