Athens

CB on the Road: Seafood in Nea Artaki

Chalkida, the small peninsula on central Evia (Euboea) just an hour’s drive from Athens, is an ideal day-trip destination for urbanites. It’s famous for an unusual phenomenon, in which the tide in the Strait of Evripos changes direction several times a day, and it’s also known among tourists for its fresh and delicious fish and seafood. When Chalkideans want fresh seafood, however, they head to the less touristed town of Nea Artaki, just north of Evia’s main city. In the tiny port, there’s a classic promenade lined with taverns, and the penultimate, Teskos, is our favorite destination. On a recent visit, the weather was beautiful, sunny and cool enough for us to sit on the sidewalk adjacent to the sea.

Athens

Greek Food Idioms: Turning Sour Grapes into Honey

With its rich, profound history – its roots lie in epics and at the foundation of modern civilization, after all – the Greek language is ripe for and with metaphor, particularly of the food-related variety. Folk sayings and proverbs have a prominent place in colloquial language and everyday life, and they are at turns humorous, instructive and ironic. And sometimes they are all three at once.

Athens

Culture Clubs: Athens' Top Spots for Greek Yogurt

In a recent New Yorker profile of Turkish entrepreneur Hamdi Ulukaya, founder of Chobani, a wildly successful company that makes Greek-style yogurt in the U.S., we read with great interest about the trip writer Rebecca Mead made to Argos, in the Peloponnese, where renowned cookbook author Diane Kochilas had told Mead she’d had “the best yogurt she had ever tasted.”

Athens

All Natural: A Shopper's Guide to Greek Wild Herbs

We’ve talked before about Greek coffee, and it’s true that going out for coffee is one of Athenians’ favorite pastimes, but there are plenty of Greeks who prefer tea or infusions. And in fact, the practice of gathering wild herbs has a history that stretches all the way back into antiquity. References to Mediterranean flora are found everywhere in history, from Egypt to Asia Minor and from Homer to the ancient Greek philosophers’ texts. Take, for instance, Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, who focused on the healing properties of plants and actually recorded about 400 species of herbs and their known uses in the 5th century BCE. That era saw a heavy trade in herbs between the Mediterranean and the East.