Open for breakfast and lunch, you can sit outside beneath the grape-vine framed awnings and watch life in this picturesque town go by (autumn is highly recommended for wildfire leaf colour), or dine inside the pantry among rows of handmade preserves and local wines and soak up the kitchen's hearty aromas.
"I have come round to accepting that my daughter's generation is a lost generation," lamented Panaghiota Mourtidou, sitting in the food pantry she helps run in central Athens.
The few exceptions became fodder for his most compelling letters, as when he found himself in the hotel pantry where Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968.
Happily, advances in technology, from fertilisers to tractors, meant that Malthus's doom-and-gloom scenario never came to pass.However, after five consecutive years in which worldwide consumption of grains such as maize (corn to Americans) and rice has outstripped production, the world's pantry is looking empty.
One reason is higher-grade ingredients; what fills the Chinese pantry now is vastly superior to what lined the shelves in the past.
They tell housewives how to shop in the streets around Tsukiji, Tokyo's pantry and the world's fish market: "Feel a little like a pro", runs the headline of one pamphlet.And they "discover" districts or individual restaurants that in fact have happily been doing business for generations and sometimes centuries which is all part of their newly discovered charm.
On a trip to the English lakes one 19th-century camping party took two tonnes of kit, including a harmonium, a separate pantry tent, a crate of biscuits and a telescope.
WHEN baking a cake it helps to have all the ingredients within reach, rather than wasting time and energy making frequent trips to the pantry.
These included the great kitchen, privy kitchen, cellar, larder, pantry, buttery, ewery, saucery, chaundry, spicery, poultery and victualling house.
The approach is rather like that of a desperate dieter padlocking his pantry.
Scott Allard, of Brookings, once saw a family pushing a shopping trolley along a motorway after leaving a food pantry sited in a suburban industrial estate.The reports paint a grim picture.
