Years had gone by, maybe more than a decade, since the last time I had visited Rena tis Ftelias, one of the best-known Greek restaurants in Athens. Rena Tolia is the chef-owner. She’s a self-made beacon of traditional Greek cuisine and author of several cookbooks. The place had not changed much. Ornate, comfortable furnishings...
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...
Thama is Greek dialect for miracle. The miracle of sorts that Thama represents is a Greek-crisis-born trend, the arrival of which has long been overdue: the mushrooming of reasonably priced, nicely appointed neighborhood restaurants with good, decent, even interesting, food. If you’re willing to take a metro ride to the Nomismatokopeio station, about 10 ...
Restaurant finds are a rare thing in Athens. The kind of places you simply stumble upon that turn out to be great are few and far between. Breeze Café is one such place. Situated on the lower plaza in the Agia Paraskevi suburb (a place that once was home to Athens’ very first pizzaria),...
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...
P as in Peskias, or P after the Pi-shaped (Π) kitchen that is the main architectural element in chef Christoforos’ Peskias’ cool northern suburb restaurant? (He just opened a second P-Box in Kolonaki, as yet to be reviewed.P Box indeed is very small, as its enigmatic name implies, but the flavors are big. The...
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.
