Thick and creamy yogurt topped with honey and walnuts, doughnut holes doused in honey (loukoumades), and custard-filled phyllo tarts (galaktoboureko) – Greece is home to a wide array of traditional desserts that are irresistible at any time of day or season. Here, we’ve rounded up some of the best spots to find these sweet treats, and have also included a long list of ice cream shops selling our new favorite dessert: gelato. In a place where half the year we live like it’s summer, gelato has become about as popular as it can get in Athens.
Opened in July 2014 near Syntagma Square, Le Greche can be blamed for starting the trend of high-quality gelato in Athens. Only the best ingredients make it through the doors of owner Evi’s laboratory. She makes her gelato from scratch according to classic Italian recipes. Velvety-textured, well-balanced, and flavorful, this is simply top gelato. Among our favorite flavors are pistachio, fior di latte, figs with mascarpone (made with the finest figs from Kalamata), and fresh lemon-and-mint sorbet.
The original owner of Χαρα (pronounced “Chara”) came from Istanbul, carrying the recipes for ekmek kadayıfı (bread pudding) and kaymak (clotted cream) in her shoe. She opened the dessert shop in 1969, and her family still owns the place, which looks like it’s stuck firmly in the ’80s, with its sepia glass walls, old-fashioned logo and an enormous catalog of decadent sweets that are fanciful in name and presentation. We come for the ekmek and the “Chicago,” a chocoholic’s dream.
An award-winning bartender, owner Thanos designed cocktail-inspired pastries alongside chef Michalis Nourloglou, fusing well-known desserts like profiterole, cheesecake, and rice pudding with tasty cocktails. Lined up like an art collection in a glass fridge are such treats as the Mai Tai citrus tart; a rum baba (a cream-filled cake soaked in rum) doused instead with caramel and homemade fassionola syrup; and the Zombie profiterole (choux filled with aged rum cream).
The tradition of the dairy bar – a place where people would go to buy milk and yogurt, or to eat rice pudding and dessert with their coffee – has all but died out. In the 1960s, Athens and Piraeus were home to some 1,600 dairy bars; today, only Stani is left. It’s been standing since 1931, and for good reason: thick and creamy yogurt topped with honey and walnuts, loukoumades (doughnut holes doused in honey) or galaktoboureko (custard and semolina in phyllo). An array of traditional desserts await.
Considered to be one of the oldest-recorded pastries (and desserts, for that matter) in the world, loukoumades are bite-sized, fluffy fried-dough balls soaked in honey and truly addictive. Finish off a meal with this sweet treat at Lukumades, where they are always crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, as they should be.
This third-generation family pastry shop near Syntagma Square dishes out superb baklava and three versions of amygdalota (almond cookies). The amazing Yiannena and Lesbos styles of baklava are made with chopped almonds, and the later version is drenched in a syrup of honey and orange.
A visit to Varsos is like traveling back in time to one of the city’s grand patisseries of the 1950s. Still in the hands of the Varsos family, its Kifisia location serves all the old-style Greek desserts anyone could wish for. It is best known for three specialties: pure, fresh whipped cream; meringue; and tsoureki, a sweet, eggy, golden-hued bread similar to brioche. We live for the gemisto, a rectangular tsoureki filled with chocolate, walnuts and brown sugar.
A decades-old shop in Nea Smyrni owned by two Greek families from Istanbul, this may be the best baklava in town. Among all the different heavenly varieties of baklava they make, the Turkish-style baklava kuru stands out, made with pistachios from the island of Aegina, many layers of pastry, a combination of high-quality sheep’s and goat’s milk butter and a comparatively drier texture (“kuru” means dry in Turkish) to typically syrupy baklava.
Another baklava stop run by a Greek family (via Istanbul) in Nea Smyrni is Maxim. The shop transports you to another time; it’s quite small and modest but filled with an air of nostalgia, which is rare in most pastry shops nowadays. Everything is incredibly fresh, and though Maxim offers a small number of pastry options, it’s tough to choose between the two types of baklava: pistachio or walnut. Both are excellent.
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