It might seem like a bad joke to name a downtown Athens restaurant-bar Pure Bliss, during the era of this city’s Pure Hell. But Pure Bliss pulls it off, providing patrons in these uncertain times a refuge against all the stress that is spreading like cancer through Greek society. The secret: a totally personal...
Determining which restaurants one likes and doesn’t isn’t an exact science. Food, service, the glamour element (or lack thereof), atmosphere, decor and what I call the comfort zone—how good you feel in a place at a given moment in time and how easy it is to experience the same feeling upon subsequent visits—are all...
The prospect of savoring a goat-meat makaronada/pasta on a pleasantly chilly night sent me from the comforts of my apartment to the fringes of Kifissia, Athens’ well-known northern suburb. Destination: a large, pleasingly busy (it was a Wednesday night) restaurant called to Kalosorisma tou Antoni, which, roughly translated, means “Antoni’s Welcome.” The building, at...
Can misery be fun? That is the question when you set out for an Italian restaurant of some repute in downtown Halandri, a well-known suburb north of Athens, on a rainy Wednesday night, after having called just a few days earlier, only to discover that in the course of 72 hours said restaurant has...
Dinner with my daughter, all of 17, is becoming increasingly more interesting. We actually set out for a new burger place in N. Psychiko, a northern suburb, but upon parking outside and looking in, we had little desire to go. Instead, we ended up across the street at the Prime Grill, on what has become...
It’s not everyday that I lose total self control and give in to the temptation for Greece’s classic “junk food”—souvlaki. But when I do, there is only one place worth sacrificing self-esteem and birthright for: Kosta’s. A tiny, hole-in-the-wall with a large following and an even larger queue, Kosta’s has been around for a...
Visit us on the Blue Zone island Ikaria, where people have the longest life spans in the world, for a week of glorious Greek cooking classes in an ancient Greek-island village.
