I'm Nikos — I'll Take You to the Athens That Exists Below the Acropolis

My name is Nikos and I grew up in Exarcheia. Athens is not a city that gets taken seriously for food and that is a significant misunderstanding. Greek food — not the tourist version, the real version — is one of the great Mediterranean cuisines and the street food is exceptional. I take groups through Monastiraki, Psiri and Exarcheia across a morning and into the afternoon: souvlaki at the stand where the taxi drivers eat, bougatsa at a bakery near Omonia that has been making it since 1952, a meze lunch at a psarotaverna near the central market where the fishermen bring the catch from Piraeus, and Greek coffee at a kafeneio in Monastiraki where an elderly man has been making it in the same briki since before I was born. I explain Athens as a lived city — the neighbourhood politics, the food culture, the way the economic crisis changed what people eat and how they eat it.