Marco is standing on the quay at Ermoupoli at ten past six in the morning, holding a canvas bag in one hand and a coffee in the other. The harbour market is already half-set-up - crates of fish on ice, baskets of tomatoes still warm from the greenhouse, bundles of herbs wrapped in newspaper. He is the only person here who arrived by sea.
“I never write a menu before I see the market,” he says, crouching to inspect a box of red mullet. “You cannot cook honestly if you decide what to make before you know what is good today.”
Marco has been cooking on yachts for nine years. Before that, he worked restaurant kitchens in Milan and Barcelona. He left because, he says, the food stopped being about the food. “In a restaurant, you cook for reviews, for the guide, for the Instagram. On a yacht, you cook for six people who are sitting three metres from your kitchen. You see their faces. You know if they are happy.”
This morning, he is cooking for eight guests on a 35-metre motor yacht anchored in the harbour. They will not wake for another two hours. By the time they come up for breakfast, the galley will smell of bread and the counter will hold a spread that looks effortless. It is not.
The Art of Market Cooking
The harbour market in Ermoupoli is not large. It is a collection of stalls and tables along the waterfront, run by fishermen who came in before dawn and farmers who drove down from the hills with whatever was ready to pick. There is no wholesale section, no pre-packaged anything. If the octopus is good, you buy the octopus. If there is no octopus, you change the plan.
Marco moves through it with the efficiency of someone who has done this in forty harbours across six countries. He talks to the fishermen in a mixture of Greek and Italian that should not work but does. He picks up a sea bream by the gills, checks the eyes, checks the colour behind the fins, and puts it back. Picks up another and nods. This one goes in the bag.
“The eyes tell you everything,” he says. “Clear and bright means it was alive this morning. Cloudy means yesterday, maybe the day before. I do not buy cloudy fish.”
He buys three bream, a kilo of prawns still twitching, and a bag of clams that the fisherman swears came from a bed just outside the harbour. Then he moves to the vegetable side: tomatoes that are ugly and misshapen and smell like summer, a bunch of flat-leaf parsley with roots still attached, courgettes the size of his thumb, a block of feta wrapped in cloth, and a jar of honey from a man who keeps bees on the hillside above the town.
Total time in the market: twenty-two minutes. Total spend: about sixty euros.
Back on Board
The galley on a yacht is nothing like a restaurant kitchen. It is compact, meticulously organised, and moves with the sea. Marco works in a space roughly the size of a bathroom, with a four-burner hob, a combination oven, and a countertop that he keeps obsessively clear because every centimetre matters.
The first thing he does is put bread on. Not from a packet - he mixed the dough last night and left it to prove overnight in the fridge. Now he shapes it, scores the top, and slides it into the oven. The smell will be the first thing the guests notice when they come up the companionway.
While the bread bakes, he prepares breakfast. On a wellness charter, this is not a full English or a pile of pastries. Marco builds what he calls “a table” - a spread designed to look abundant without being heavy. Today it includes thick Greek yoghurt with the hillside honey and toasted almonds, sliced fruit from the market, the bread with olive oil for dipping, a bowl of cherry tomatoes, soft-boiled eggs, and a small plate of cured fish he prepared two days ago in Mykonos.
“People think wellness food means restriction,” he says, arranging the table on the aft deck. “It does not. It means real food, cooked properly, from ingredients that were alive or growing this morning. You do not need to take anything away. You just need to stop adding rubbish.”
Cooking Without a Net
The thing that separates yacht cooking from every other kind of professional food preparation is the absence of a supply chain. In a restaurant, you place an order with your supplier and it arrives the next morning. On a yacht, you get what the harbour has. If you are anchored in a remote cove, you get what is already in the cold store.
This constraint, Marco says, is what makes the food better. “When you have everything available, you get lazy. You make the same dishes because the same ingredients are always there. When you have to work with what you find, you think differently. You taste something at the market and the dish appears in your head.”
Today’s market run has already shaped the next 24 hours of meals. The bream will be lunch - grilled whole with lemon, herbs from the boat’s small deck garden, and a salad of those misshapen tomatoes with the feta. The prawns are for tonight, probably with pasta, though Marco has not committed yet. The clams will be tomorrow’s starter if they pass his freshness test after a night in the fridge.
The courgettes will be grilled for breakfast tomorrow, thinly sliced and dressed with olive oil and mint. The honey will last the rest of the week.
The Wellness Kitchen
On a wellness charter, the chef’s role extends beyond cooking into something closer to nutrition design. Marco works with the charter planner before the voyage to understand each guest’s requirements - allergies, intolerances, preferences, and goals. Some want to lose weight. Some want to eat clean. Some just want to feel good.
“The sea makes people hungry,” he says. “Swimming, the sun, the air - you burn energy differently on the water. So I do not restrict portions. I change the quality. More fish, more vegetables, more whole grains. Less sugar, less processed anything. Good fats from olive oil and nuts. Plenty of water and fresh juice.”
He also pays attention to timing. Breakfast is light and energy-dense to fuel a morning swim or a shore excursion. Lunch is the main meal, built around protein and vegetables, served when the body is most efficient at digestion. Dinner is lighter than people expect - often something simple and clean after a day in the sun, eaten early enough that the body has time to process it before sleep.
The result, over the course of a week, is that people feel noticeably different. Not because they have been dieting, but because every meal has been built from ingredients that existed in their whole form earlier that day.
The Invisible Craft
By eight o’clock, Marco is cleaning the galley. The bread is cooling on a rack. The breakfast table is set on the aft deck, looking like something from a food magazine except that nobody styled it - it just looks that way because the ingredients are good and the light on a Greek harbour at eight in the morning is impossible to get wrong.
The first guest appears at the top of the companionway, still half-asleep, and stops. Looks at the table. Looks at the water. Takes a breath of air that smells of bread and salt and coffee.
“This is incredible,” she says.
Marco smiles, wipes down the counter one more time, and starts thinking about lunch.
Marco’s name has been changed. The harbour market in Ermoupoli on Syros is real and worth visiting if you are anywhere near the Cyclades. Get there before seven.