It doesn’t matter how early you show up to the Black Salami Microbakery – there’s always a line. Even right at 9 a.m., when the gates have just been pulled up, tourists and locals alike are waiting for fresh, flaky sandwiches and crusty loaves of bread. Clean, sleek, and cool, with funky marbled counters like a refrigerator mosaic cake, the bakery floods with light on sunny days, illuminating a display case filled with breakfast and lunch options.

This is one of a number of new spots that have popped up in the Exarchia neighborhood recently. It’s also part of a transformation the neighborhood has been seeing for some time now – one that has accelerated in the past year, as the city’s newest metro line raises questions about the pros and cons of opening a major transit station in the main square. On one hand, change is good – here, it helps drive out crime – but on the other, it has led to rising rents that push out locals. Those who are able to stay feel as though the neighborhood is changing rapidly, and while much of this change is for the better, it only serves to continue bringing in foreigners that snap up entire buildings and drive rents up even higher. It is a frenetic – bordering unsustainable – atmosphere in a city where locals often don’t make enough to allow them to continue living in the city center.

Black Salami owner Anthony Kazakos has been living in Exarchia since 2005. He stands outside the shop, saying hi to many of the people passing by. He also frequently pops into the various rooms of the store, checking in on what the bakers are doing. The genuine interest he takes in the store, and the people in it – even the people visiting it – is palpable, and almost contagious. It’s a conscious effort on Kazakos’ part. He hires based more on character than expertise, because, as he explains, he looks for people who “actually want to wake up and come to work! This is how you can be creative.”

Kazakos isn’t a baker by training. He has a degree in political science, and worked abroad in qualitative and quantitative data analysis, before returning to Greece in 2005, where he fell in love once again with his native language and the city of Athens. He counts himself among a new generation of Greeks who have lived abroad and have returned to their home country with different ways of thinking about running a business, and the potential it can have. In 2017, Kazakos started working with dough, and playing with different varieties of flour. “Using different flour really gives you a different outcome,” he explains. “Just like with specialty coffee, or [like] a grape does with wine, it’s the same for bread.”

The bakery exploded when it first opened – and Kazakos didn’t even do anything. No promotion, no social media blitz; only one fairly cryptic post on Instagram. “Just a week before we opened, I regretted everything,” he said, even citing the name of the bakery, which he says he came up with as a way of provoking people (“Who could forget it?” he laughs). Their production is limited even today – they produce a maximum of 100 loaves per day – and when they first opened to the public, everything was sold out by 11 a.m. “We had no idea about the competition or how people would receive it,” he explains, “but we ended up doing things that people actually like.”

And the bread is, indeed, a standout in Athens, even among a growing crowd of high-caliber sourdough bakeries. The Black Salami takes their commitment to good flour very seriously, heading to a small mill in Turin, Italy, to source completely natural flour that is ethically produced. “We begged them, and they were very reluctant,” he explains, “but they understood that we are quite serious about our approach to breadmaking.” The Black Salami breads don’t lean on mixtures, added sugars, and chemical additives, and their production is small-scale: it gives them the freedom to pay close attention to their ingredients.

Creativity is highly encouraged at Black Salami. “Everyone here has the right and the opportunity to express themselves creatively,” says Kazakos. “We mostly come from scientific and academic backgrounds, so we design theoretically first, and then practically.” The result is a blend of traditional Greek dishes with a modern mentality on fast food, all with quality ingredients front-of-mind at all times. Perhaps the most famous is the moussaka sandwich, which features slow-cooked beef ragù, smoked scamorza béchamel, roasted eggplant, and super crispy potato sticks between two slices of semi whole wheat bread.

They’ve also been known to take deliciously rich avgolemono sauce, a key element to a number of comforting Greek dishes, adding sliced zucchini, ground beef, and a layer of feta to the mix to create a sandwich that could be breakfast, lunch, or dinner. And for those who try the pastrami, it’s a reason to keep coming back – they make their own mayo and sauerkraut, and their olive oil comes from a mountain village in Mani, south on the Greek mainland, where the olive trees grow on rocks, which means very little water retention, and therefore very low acidity.

Besides the sandwiches, which do form the bulk of the menu here, the bakery serves up a variety of coffees, as well as eggy breakfast options (think eggs benedict, eggs florentine, and even avocado toast with egg). The display also contains cookies and small snacks to satisfy a sweet tooth.

But throughout the menu, everything comes back to an intense devotion to good ingredients. “We go directly to our producers,” says Kazakos, and the end result is that even the simplest sandwich is beautifully executed. The mortadella sandwich, for instance, has just a slim cut of meat, a melty squish of cheese, and a tomato oozing juice on super thin, crunchy bread.

In an area that has been defined by revolution, there is sure to be more to come. “A lot of new businesses are opening around here,” Kazakos says, “created by like-minded young people. Exarchia used to be very vibrant – it was the most vibrant neighborhood in 2005 – and it’s why I chose to live here when I returned from England.” He explains that Exarchia is getting back to that vibrancy from before. Now, it has great bread too.

Published on October 12, 2022

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