Every guest arrives to a cold glass of apricot juice. It is the first thing Maria taught the team to make, and the recipe is almost embarrassingly short.
The trick is the fruit. The Imerovigli apricot ripens later and sweeter than the ones you find in Athens — smaller, a little wrinkled, picked when it is almost too soft to travel. If you cannot get those, use the ripest you can find and cut the sugar.
The recipe
Three ingredients: a kilo of ripe apricots, the juice of one lemon, and cold water. Stone the apricots, blend with the lemon and just enough water to loosen, then chill hard for two hours. No sugar unless the fruit needs it. Serve it so cold the glass sweats.
The one important step people skip: strain it once through a coarse sieve. It should be smooth but still have body — not a smoothie, not a cordial. Somewhere in between, like the island in October.