By Lisa Radinovsky from Greek Liquid Gold.
Athens food culture has shifted dramatically from its traditional taverna days. Now “the Greek capital is one of the most vibrant cities in Europe, if not the world, with a food scene that is as multilayered and fascinating as its history, a city at once ancient and modern” (2), with food that’s both Greek and multicultural, sometimes in the same dish.
Internationally recognized Greek chef, television personality, and award-winning cookbook author Diane Kochilas affectionately presents the city’s past and present culinary attractions in her eleventh cookbook, Athens: Food, Stories, Love. This book is a collection of 150 recipes, but it is also much more than that. Kochilas calls it “part memoir, part reporting, and part guide” (9).
The easygoing style and intriguing paragraphs and pages of memories, origin stories, explanations, and recommendations introduce and contextualize the recipes in engaging, informative narrative sections on Athens restaurants, chefs, neighborhoods, types of food, and dishes. This is a book for foodies, philhellenes, travelers, and everyone else interested in the food and drink of Greece’s capital city.
Athens food culture context, themes, and topics
In almost 400 pages, Kochilas considers the context of the rich Athens food culture, as well as sharing a generous number of its recipes. She offers insights on such topics as farmers’ markets, cafés and cafeneia, tavernas, ouzeries, the eastern Mediterranean “meze tradition of enjoying small plates of savory food, accompanied by wine, ouzo, raki, or tsipouro” (102), a French-ward “bourgeois” shift in Greek cooking after World War II, and the recent official expansion of Greek breakfast options.
Based on both research and Kochilas’s own experience of the Greek capital since the 1970s, Athens: Food, Stories, Love—A Cookbook explores several major topics and themes:
- Traditional Athenian foods and recipes, and new versions of them
- The most emblematic dishes of Athens and favorite places to eat them
- People and restaurants that have shaped the Athens food culture
- The past and present aura of various neighborhoods in the city
- The way the cuisine of Athens has been affected by migration
The book is organized in chapters focused on types of food: street food such as cheese pies and souvlaki, breakfasts, dips, appetizers (mezedes), salads, soups, carbs (mostly rice and pasta), meats, seafood, and desserts, plus taverna food, “bourgeois” dishes, plant-forward foods—and one final short chapter on drinks.
Often rich in extra virgin olive oil, the recipes are designed to “be cooked by just about anyone without too much difficulty” (9). Kochilas helpfully offers alternatives for ingredients that would be hard to find outside Athens or Greece.
Recipes vary from traditional and expected, to these more surprising additions to Athens food culture:
- Calamari Souvlaki
- Spanakopita Crepes
- Melitzanosalata with Miso, Tahini, and Petimezi
- Lazarou’s Cuttlefish Ink and Crab Soup
- Giant Beans with a Grec-Mex Touch
- Beet Risotto with Beet Greens and Feta
- Ouzo Salmon Cooked over Greens
- Greek Sushi Dolmades
- Grec-Mex Chicken Fajitas
- Feminist Lamb and Potatoes
Kochilas recommends treating the city as far more than a stopover en route to the islands, because Athens has “become an amazing food city, an international food city, where Greek and global flavors mesh seamlessly” (8). For example, chefs are now adding to fava–traditionally a spread made from pureed yellow split peas–such ingredients as fermented black garlic, squid ink, or soy sauce, and topping it with everything “from Thai-spiced carrots to tomato salsa” (95) and grilled squid, smoked eel, or octopus.
In addition to its famous museums and archaeological sites, Athens now offers some of the world’s top 50 bars, farmers’ markets with both local and international ingredients, and everything from street food such as bread rings and souvlaki to “the majority of Greece’s finest chefs, with twenty-seven Michelin stars to its name as of this writing” (9).
An enduring landmark in the Athens food scene: Varvakeios market
One of the enduring Athens landmarks Kochilas highlights is the Varvakeios (or Central) meat and fish market. Her introduction to a recipe for Athens Central Market Beef Soup provides an excellent example of her book’s vivid imagery and its mixtures of personal, cultural, and historical experiences of Athens food.
I head to Epirus in the Central Market for this [soup]. [The Varvakeios market is] so characteristically Athens, timeless Athens, unsexy Athens, real Athens. Epirus sits on a corner of the market, within breathing distance of the meat hawkers shouting for your attention while hacking away on bloodied butcher blocks, no frills and no decorum in sight. The market is not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure, but to walk through it is to step back a few decades, when Athens was still a provincial city. Restaurants like Epirus abounded. It is what Greeks call a mageirio, from the verb ‘to cook,’ mageirevo, and refers to a specific type of traditional eating establishment with an open kitchen where a dozen or so different Greek classics sit in steam-table basins for diners to see and choose from. (172) –From ATHENS, by Diane Kochilas. Copyright © 2025 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
The Varvakeios market, Kochilas adds, “continues to be the traditional culinary heart of the city, where rich and poor shop for the freshest meats and fish, but is also now a destination where tourists flock…on that ephemeral search for the authentic” (175).
Vegetarian options: Indispensable in Greek food culture
Despite the appearance of the Central Market’s main building, vegetarians need not fear that the Athens food culture will neglect them. For one thing, there’s a major produce market across the street from the building full of meat and fish. Moreover, Kochilas contends that “Greece boasts more plant-based recipes than any other cuisine in the Mediterranean” (242). Its capital’s restaurants now feature everything from traditional moussaka, grilled fish, and olive-oil based vegetable stews called “ladera” to sushi and vegan versions of classic dishes.
Kochilas explains in her introduction to a recipe for the vegan Mushroom Chickpea Tigania, “this dish in so many ways represents the new Athens: Greek but international, too, culled from tradition but changed, a mix of well-known Greek ingredients like honey, with newcomers like soy sauce, which would have been an unthinkable, even unknowable, addition a generation ago” (130).
Vegan restaurants and specialty foods have become very common in Athens, with chefs often using “natural, unprocessed foods to create plant-based versions of familiar Greek dishes. Hence things
like vegan moussaka with beans in the ‘meat’ sauce, and veggie burgers that take traditional dishes like fava (puree of yellow split peas) and turn them into hearty, plant-based fare” (242). Actually, Greeks have always done this, reinterpreting “carnivorous pleasures not with laboratory meats but with other ingredients that are natural—real food” (255).
The book’s final section, dedicated to drinks, offers several pages of information on Athens drinking customs, drinks, bars, and wines. Kochilas points out that the Greek capital has “some of the best cocktail bars in the world” (368). In addition, an increasing number of wine bars provide “a venue where one can sample the hundreds and hundreds of world-class Greek wines” (368), thanks to great changes in Greek winemaking in recent decades.
Planning your visit to Athens (real or vicarious)
The recommendations and information in Athens: Food, Stories, Love–A Cookbook will be invaluable to anyone planning to explore the food culture of Athens. And the recipes can help recreate the flavors of a visit. For those unable to travel to Greece, this may be the closest you’ll get to a re-creation of the flavors, aromas, and culinary panorama of Athens.
A selection of Kochilas’s recommendations for Athens eateries (see her book for many more)
Souvlaki
Bairaktaris, Thanasis and Savvas at lower Mitropoleos Street and Monastiraki Square
Kostas at Syntagma
Tavernas / traditional Greek food
Epirus in the Varvakeios Central Market
Diporto and To Steki tou Theatrou, Theatrou Street, near the Central Market
The meat tavernas along the coast of Vari, south of Athens
Seafood
Pezoulas in Kallithea
Varoulko in Piraeus
Mezedes
Avli in Psyrri
Athinaikon, Kapetan Mihalis, and Lesvos in Exarcheia
Bars
Baba au Rum in Psyrri
The Clumsies on Praxitelous Street
Dessert
Classic shops: Désiré in Kolonaki, Asimakopoulos in Exarcheia, Bozas in Kypseli
For loukoumades: Krinos on Aiolou Street and Ktistakis on Sokratous
From ATHENS, by Diane Kochilas. Copyright © 2025 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
*Originally published on Greek Liquid Gold: Authentic Extra Virgin Olive Oil (greekliquidgold.com). See that site for recipes with olive oil, photos from Greece, agrotourism and food tourism suggestions, and olive oil news and information.
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