In Greece, Easter is not just a holiday; it is a celebration of life, faith, and hope – a tradition that unites families and communities in ways that few other occasions can. It is a time of reflection, renewal, and festivity, where centuries-old customs are lovingly upheld. The journey to this sacred day reaches its final peak on Lazarus Saturday, which marks the start of the most important week in the Greek Christian calendar – Holy Week. This day, a week before Easter, holds both religious and cultural significance, setting the stage for the symbolic meaning and importance of each day of this Holy Week, culminating in Easter itself. Lazarus Saturday is also the day that the baking begins in homes across Greece.

“Ο Μάρτης πότε γελά και πότε κλαίει” – Μarch sometimes laughs and sometimes cries. So the idiom goes here, as has this year. There are many phrases like this about March in the Greek language. Most of them (like in other cultures) focus on the weather’s instability during the month, and folk tradition believes that the weather gives us a glimpse of what will come in summer. This March was unstable, to say the least: one week it was snowing, then the next the spring sun was shining, and then again back to snowy winter! One of my favorite March traditions is donning a bracelet made with red and white thread. We call it “martis” or “martia” after the month’s name, and we make it on the last day of February and wear it on March 1.

Leafy, affluent, and deeply nostalgic, Kifissia blends old villas, historic tavernas, and classic pastry shops with some of Athens’ best modern dining, all just a short train ride from the city center.

When I think of Christmas and the festive season, I’m immediately transported back to my childhood. Christmas to a child is something magical – the massive tree lit up and surrounded by gifts, stockings hung on the fireplace, a warm home filled with loving faces. And, of course, food always plays an important role in my memories of the holidays. Even though I don’t come from a very traditional family, certain customs – particularly those related to food – were devotedly repeated every single year with no second thought. Every year during the Christmas season, I realize how much I miss these rituals.

Important holidays have long been associated with large feasts and for centuries have functioned as an excuse to treat family and guests to something special. Christmas in Greece is no exception: there are many culinary traditions associated with the Christmas season, known as Dodekaimero (twelve days), which officially begins on December 24 and ends on January 6. Nowadays many Greeks associate the Christmas table with a roast stuffed turkey, a tradition that arrived in Europe from North America, particularly Mexico, around the 1820s. It gradually became fashionable in Greek cities and over time turned into a Christmas staple, with a traditional stuffing prepared mainly with chestnuts, chopped turkey liver, minced meat, pine nuts and raisins.

From Athens to Marseille, Paris, Porto, Palermo, and beyond, our contributors name the one dish they couldn’t stop thinking about in 2025. A city-by-city roundup of the best bites they ate all year, from neighborhood classics to quietly exceptional plates.

Let us begin with a little Greek mythology. Hermes – son of Zeus, god of thieves and commerce and messenger of Olympus – and Krokos, a mortal youth, were best friends. One day, while the two friends were practicing their discus throwing, Hermes accidentally hit Crocus on the head and wounded him fatally. On the very spot where he was felled, a beautiful flower sprang up. Three drops of blood from Krokos’s head fell on the center of the flower, from which three stigmas grew. This is just one of many origin stories for Crocus sativus, or the saffron crocus, whose crimson stigmas are harvested to make the highly prized spice of the same name.

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.

Evi Papadopoulou is no stranger to the culinary arts. A well-regarded food journalist who has written articles on pastries and desserts in the top Greek gastronomy publications, she is also a classically trained chef. She studied at the culinary school of renowned Italian pastry chef Iginio Massari and followed that up with specialized training in making artisanal gelato at Francesco Palmieri’s prestigious laboratory in Puglia, Italy. In July of 2014, Papadopoulou opened Le Greche, a gelato parlor tucked away on Mitropoleos Street, right off Syntagma Square. The parlor itself is straight out of an Alphonse Mucha painting and has an Art Nouveau feel, with its airy, muted color palette. Since it opened, the shop has accumulated quite a cult following – and for good reason.

Editor’s note: Carolina Doriti, our Athens bureau chief, was born in the Greek capital, where she grew up in a family with a long culinary tradition. Having studied arts management, she pursued a career as a curator but quickly set her museum work aside to follow her true passion: cooking! Since then, along with her work with CB as both a writer and tour leader, Carolina has been working as a chef, restaurant consultant and food stylist. She is also the Culinary Producer of My Greek Table, a TV series on Greek gastronomy, broadcast on PBS across the US. She has appeared on various cooking shows on Greek and Spanish TV and gives cooking classes and workshops in Athens. The Greek Islands Cookbook is her second cookbook.

The typical after-beach taverna in Greece almost always focuses on fish. You want to sit seaside, still a little salty from your swim, watching the last rays of the day’s sunshine drip into the sea. It’s certainly a beautiful image, and very typically Greek. Most of the time, a day trip to the beach does end this way, particularly for Athenians when they’re looking for an escape from the sticky heat of the city center. Trigono, a restaurant in the town of Kalyvia, makes the case for ditching post-dip fish in favor of something else: grilled meat. Tomahawk steaks, lamb ribs, long spicy sausages, even offal cuts that you wouldn’t expect to see outside of major Greek holidays.

Athens’s central and largest food market is located off of National Road, between downtown Athens and Piraeus port, in an industrial area called Rendis. It covers about 60 acres of land and was inaugurated back in 1959 when the city realized that the two existing markets of Piraeus and central Athens were not enough to cover the population’s needs. But there was also a vision of developing Rendis (which back then was an agricultural zone, with lots of farmers working the fields in the area) as the main source of food supply for the city of Athens. Moreover, the location that was picked for the market was convenient, as it is easy to access both from the north and south of Attica. For visitors today, it’s best to drive there or take a taxi, and once you approach the market, you’ll notice the huge trucks heading towards it. Larger shops selling vegetables, fruit, seafood, meat and hundreds of other food products line the entrance and wind around the main market gate.

On Easter Sunday in Greece the star of the feast is the lamb, which is often substituted with goat. In some regions (and nowadays all across the country) it’s iconically slow roasted outdoors on a large rotating spit, symbolizing the sacrifice of Christ for the salvation of humanity. This tradition of spit roast lamb is linked to customs from ancient Greece and the Jewish Passover. In many parts of Greece, tradition calls for other recipes for cooking or roasting Easter lamb. Tradition generally dictates that the whole Easter lamb must be used and consumed – including the offal and head – as the lamb here is symbolic and represents the animal sacrificed during the Resurrection of Christ, and thus serves as a tribute to the divine sacrifice.

After World War II, many Greek islanders left their homes and moved to Athens for work and a brighter future. Such was the case with Nikos and Irene Vasilas, who came to Athens from the island of Naxos during their late teenage years; Irene came from Apiranthos village and Nikos from Danakos, both mountain villages. Despite the fact they both came from the same island, the two of them met and got married in Athens, where Irene worked as a housekeeper and Nikos as a builder – or to be more precise, a “digger,” as they used to call those who specialized in digging into the hills for construction. In those post-war years, the neighborhood the couple lived in – which would eventually be named Polygono – was situated on the city’s hilly outskirts. It’s where Nikos built their home, which still stands right here.

Eating in the Greek capital is always an adventure. In 2024, our best bites spanned from small bites and snacks to drinks and full-blown feasts – there’s a perfect bite for every moment in Athens, just waiting for intrepid eaters to seek it out. The following list is something of a sensory walk through the city: you’ll find salty seafood and iced treats ideal for hot summer days, the perfect cocktail spot in the vibrant neighborhood of Neos Kosmos; creamy, traditional-style Greek yogurt; and beautiful, modern takes on traditional dishes. It’s almost too much to fit into one year – we’re excited to keep eating our way through Athens in 2025.