Since moving home to Australia, I have heard more than one story about souvlaki-inspired fistfights. My brother tells of drunk people in the street punching one-handed while holding their pita-wrapped meat protectively behind them. My sister claims to have seen a brawl in a Fitzroy cocktail bar that was prompted by a disagreement over the comparative quality of two dueling neighborhood souvlaki shops. There’s a lot of passion in this country when it comes to Greek food.

The oft-quoted factoid that there are more Greeks in Melbourne than any other city in the world outside Greece is somewhat debatable. It depends on what you mean by “Greeks,” what you mean by “city,” and which statistics you trust. According to census numbers, the New York metropolitan area has a higher number of self-identified Greeks than Melbourne, but that area includes giant hunks of Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as all of Long Island and most of the Hudson Valley.

The first Greeks came to Australia in the early 19th century, but the majority arrived here between the end of World War II and the 1970s — and most came to Victoria. Melbourne is the epicenter of the Australian Greek community, but that community extends across the country and into major aspects of our culinary lives. When my family moved from Melbourne to the United States in the early 1990s, we quickly came to the conclusion that the main difference in the two nations’ cooking was our prodigious use of lemon juice and olive oil.