Athens: In Which Ian Gets His Bourdain On

January 01, 2019

Athens: In Which Ian Gets His Bourdain On

The One Where They Talk About The Food

Hi everyone! Lindsey subcontracted this post to me because I’m pretty much always doing Anthony Bourdain cosplay. My impressions here are necessarily colored by Vacation Mouth – things taste better because they’re different, and someone brought them to you, and you didn’t have to cook them yourself. But Vacation Mouth (TM) can’t make bad food good. And everything we’ve had is good.

At breakfast at our hotel on the first day, Simon surprised us by going headlong into a couple of new foods – or, maybe better to say, foods he hadn’t eaten in so long that they were functionally new. The breakfast buffet had what seemed to be the Greek equivalent of Li’l Smokies. He was interested. I was skeptical. Anyway, he thinks they’re great. We’ve been getting a couple of them, a bunch of wonderful full-fat yogurt, and sometimes even a croissant (pronounced “crossnot” in four-year-old speech) into him each morning. (He has mostly been licking the Nutella I put inside the croissant out of it and eating pastry incidentally during the process. Do shut up about it.)

SO LET’S TALK ABOUT THAT YOGURT. It’s thick and creamy and sticks to a spoon even when you’re holding it upside down. And shaking it. It is by itself everything I want for breakfast. But also there are toppings – honey, apricot jam, and the king of them all, Morello cherries. So you have your fat, and your tart, and your sweet, and it’s basically perfect.

If that were all that were available for breakfast, we wouldn’t be able to complain. But there are also these savory pastries, little spinach pies and little triangles filled with feta. The spinach pies are decent. The feta triangles are an amazing textural experience, with crispy puff pastry and soft cheese. I eat about three of them a day.

So typically (once there are three data points, you can say “typically” I guess) we load up on those and head out to do tourism things until someone gets tired, or hungry, or cranky. “Someone” isn’t code in that sentence. It’s not always Simon. Then we have a lunch so big that it makes dinner almost irrelevant.

I have a very scientific method for finding restaurants in a new place. It involves zooming in on Google Maps near the tourist site we’re visiting, clicking reviews, and sometimes also using TripAdvisor and excluding results that say $$$ or $$$$ or God forbid $$$$$. This works surprisingly well.

On Sunday after touring the Acropolis and Agora, and giving Simon a little rest, we went to a little place called Sfika (Wasp) that people speak well of. Simon rediscovered, here, that hot cocoa made from scratch with whole milk is amazing, and since we’re on vacation he’s allowed to have a lot of it. He also, emboldened by the breakfast experience, demanded a sausage.

It came, and Lindsey and I tried it, and we wordlessly agreed that this crispy, spicy village sausage was 1. Astonishing and 2. Much too flavorful for our child to eat it.

Naturally, he devoured it.

Our meal was also outstanding. We shared some grilled chicken and a platter of vegetarian appetizers. The highlights were a black-eyed pea salad with red onion, zucchini fritters, and some little fried cheese balls – I’m not sure what the cheese inside was, but it was more savory than salty, kind of similar to fontina.

Also I took it on myself to sample the local beer, which is…fine. Even if you haven’t had this beer, you’ve had this beer. Pretty normal light lager, good when cold, plentiful, and staying out of the way of very flavorful food.

Our evening “snack” turned out to be a little more substantial. Simon, who had an orange smoothie, declared it THE GREAT CHRISTMAS FEAST, and we didn’t really have the heart to say it was December 30^th. Stuffed grape leaves with yogurt and olive oil were completely fine. A cheese pie with spearmint leaves was an entirely different experience – somehow the salt of the cheese and the coolness of the mint work nicely together.

Dessert was what the English menu called “spoon sweets,” fruit preserved in sugar syrup. This was pretty good with tart cherries, but completely transformed green grapes, which just became saturated with it without losing their natural flavor. Also there was what the menu called “orange pie” but what was in fact a citrusy semolina cake, light and fluffy.

The meal was well complemented by our first glass of ouzo and several shots of rakomelo – warm brandy with honey and spices. The taste is very much like if mulled wine were a liquor. We ate at a table outside because the inside of the café we chose was too smoky, and the rakomelo warmed us up (and took some of the pain off Lindsey’s ankle) until it was time to go back to the hotel.

Day 2 was hotel breakfast, again. I showed restraint by having only one apple turnover after a full breakfast.

Then within an hour of visiting the Acropolis museum Simon was crabby and hungry, and we needed to kill some time because it was raining. So we went to its café. Simon had another hot cocoa; Lindsey had an iced tea with thyme; I enjoyed a frappe, a foamed iced coffee with lots of milk and sugar. It was kind of like a coffee milkshake and tasted like a meal.

Not that this stopped us from having our appointed lunch an hour and a half later. The choice was Liondi, a little place across from the museum. When we got there, it was still a half-hour before the ovens would be warm enough to cook. We shared a carafe of dry, light homemade wine, did a puzzle, and waited.

It was worth it. We’re probably going back again today.

There was an appetizer of pita bread with spicy feta dip, something like a Greek answer to pimento cheese. Feta mixed with olive oil, oregano, sumac, pepper flakes, and a couple of other things I couldn’t place. It went well with the wine, and the heat was just enough to draw you in without being overwhelming.

We then shared three entrees around. Simon had his now-traditional sausage, of which he had an entire link – but so generous were the portions that there were two more left. (So Lindsey and I also got to sample it. Can confirm, pretty good sausage. Sfika’s was better IMO.)

Lindsey and I shared a plate of moussaka, which…what can you say about it? It’s a classic for a reason, with the béchamel tying together cool eggplant and spicy beef. The pork gyros we shared were a revelation – thinly shaved bits of meat and fat reminiscent of carnitas.

The meal closed with another orange pie, on the house. This one was better – soaked through with simple syrup and with a candied orange wedge on top.

We were waddling for the rest of the day out. A little 24-hour café near our hotel provided a New Year’s Eve snack in the comfort of our hotel room – a beef gyro, a salad, and best of all some baked and breaded feta with sesame and honey. The first two were fine, basic fast food fare. The latter was totally unexpected. The sesame brings some more of feta’s savory flavors out, and the honey balances it.

Somehow we are yet to have baklava or seafood. Couple days left to address that.

And now, extra photos from our first day: