In business since 1887, Diporto – a defiantly traditional spot in downtown Athens – has no sign and no menu. The staff doesn’t speak a word of English, and you might have to share a table with eccentric old men who look like they stepped out of a folk ballad. You will probably have to mime your order or draw it on the paper tablecloth. But if you ever wondered what it would be like to eat in a working-class Greek taverna circa 1950, read on. Diporto is located smack in the middle of what is – at least by day – one of the Athens’ most fascinating areas, home to a variety of specialized marketplaces. Varvakeios, one of the few of its kind in Europe, is the city’s largest fish and meat market, in operation since 1886. Around this enormous, chaotic market, where vendors try to outdo each other in shouting, lies Athens’ traditional center of trade, with streets devoted to specific merchandise: hardware stores and bric-a-brac on Athinas Street; spices, cheeses, kitchen equipment and plants on Evripidou and Sofokleous; doorknobs on Vissis (yes, there is a street dedicated solely to doorknobs).

When Tasos Perdikis and Aris Doukas met a few years back – the two men were working at the same restaurant, although not in the kitchen – they bonded over their love of food. As Tasos tells it, they were both obsessed with souvlaki. Almost immediately they started making future plans to open their own souvlaki shop. They agreed on the fundamentals: simple, old-school souvlaki (which also happens to be our favorite). Made without potatoes and often not even tzatziki, this type of souvlaki spotlights the quality of the pita bread and the meat (typically pork); slices of fresh tomato and onion mixed with chopped parsley round out this divine Greek “sandwich.”

In the midst of lockdown, it sometimes felt as if we would never eat in a restaurant again. While we dreamed of visiting our favorite spots, greeting the owners warmly and sitting down for a long, satisfying meal, we never let ourselves imagine a future in which new restaurants opened, especially bold and exciting places like Kafeneion SI TI SI. Yet chef Alexandros (Alex) Tsiotinis let himself dream – the idea for this modern kafeneio (a traditional kafeneio being an all-day venue serving coffee, booze and mezes) was, in fact, born during lockdown. The owners of Senios, a meze restaurant located downtown, came to him with a proposal to join forces. Alex accepted and quickly began crafting a menu featuring his own takes on typical kafeneio mezes.

All the seafood that Mother Sea gives us is well presented and decorated at the Athenian market. Daily fresh fish, delivered from the Greek islands of the Aegean.

Editor’s note: We’re celebrating another year of excellent backstreets eating by taking a look back at our favorite restaurants and dishes of 2015. In a country that can boast of very few authentic (if there can be said to be such a thing when it comes to cooking) Greek desserts, galaktoboureko remains quintessentially Greek. This semolina custard pie of cream between layers of thin phyllo doused in syrup remains a firm national favorite. Kosmikon is the undisputed king of Athenian galaktoboureko. An old-fashioned dessert shop operating since 1961, it now has five locations around Athens. The galaktoboureko here is done the traditional way, with butter from Thessaly in central Greece or Mytilene, homemade phyllo and – most importantly – no lemon or orange flavoring, just the traditional vanilla. The result is that rare thing when it comes to phyllo-based, syrup-drenched desserts: a wonderfully balanced concoction, sweet but not too sweet, with cream oozing from the sides, and the phyllo remaining thin and crisp. We recommend going to the two central locations in Agios Nikolaos and Agios Eleftherios for their charmingly retro atmosphere.

With the banks closed for almost two weeks and Greece’s position in the eurozone the subject of heated debate and endless negotiations for the past several months, we wondered how some of our favorite restaurants were coping. Greeks had voted NO to austerity the previous Sunday (July 5), but did this mean they were spending their spare cash on staples for harder times and going out only to take part in demonstrations or stand in ATM queues?

In Athens, apart from traditional or nouvelle Greek, you can find almost any kind of cuisine you crave, but usually not under one roof. Thanks to the influx of immigrants and diaspora Greeks in the past 20 years, the city’s roster of foreign restaurants is no longer confined to Italian, French and a sprinkling of swanky Asian and Indian places with white tablecloths.

If there is one single food family that shows off the breadth and extent of the collective Greek culinary imagination, it has to be the humble legume. Together with wheat, beans of all kinds, along with lentils, chickpeas and split peas, form the very foundation of the Greek diet and have done so since Neolithic times.

Editor’s note: The year is coming to an end, which means it’s time for us to look back on all the great eating experiences we had in 2014 and name our favorites among them. Pavlidis This modern-looking patisserie is located in central Athens on busy Katehaki, a street more associated with car mechanics than with any sort of food. The Pavlidis family has been in the pastry business since 1932. Famous for its galaktoboureko, this patisserie actually prides itself on its mandoles, a rock-shaped chocolate concoction with caramelized almonds. But really, it’s the kaimaki ice cream which comes in two different variations that we love most. Good kaimaki ice cream is hard to come by; it tends to be quite heavy. Pavlidis makes its version the classic – and correct – way, using buffalo milk, mastic and salepi, flour made from the root of wild orchids, which produces a milky and chewy treat. The bitter almond version is a fragrant, melt-in-your-mouth masterpiece. This is far and away our favorite ice cream in Athens.

Athinas is one of our favorite streets in the whole of Athens. Running from Omonia to Monastiraki squares, it has a scruffy, chaotic, disreputable charm that has hardly changed since we moved to Greece more than 40 years ago. From the Omonia side to City Hall and the Central Market, hawkers and peddlers – of everything from sunglasses and “magic” juicers to contraband cigarettes – make the sidewalk an obstacle course for the crowds of shoppers in search of bargains in open storefronts.

Like many cultures with a strong national food culture, Athens has been slow to welcome foreign cuisines. First, there were the heady 1990s, when the first luxurious restaurants serving such food opened. That was followed by a decade of discovery, with the first mid-priced sushi and Indian restaurants appearing left, right and center. An enormous influx of immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and North Africa from the mid-2000s onwards brought pockets of Middle Eastern grocery stores and eateries to downtown Athens, Kypseli and Patisia. Just a few years ago, Athens’ Middle Eastern food scene was divided in two, with various mid-priced to expensive restaurants catering to Greeks and the Kurdish, Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan immigrants making delicious street food for their own communities (and a few adventurous Athenians).

What are the odds that after you’ve been to an exhibition of finds from a long-ago shipwreck you’ll end up having lunch at a place named Shipwreck of Angels? We’d been to the National Archaeological Museum in downtown Athens to see a roomful of haunting statues wrenched up from the deep off the tiny island of Antikythera. Though half the marble exposed to the saltwater was corroded and raw-looking, the torsos, limbs and faces that had lain under the sand for 2,000 years remained flawless and smooth. The sight of them was both moving and troubling, as if they were souls that should not have been disturbed.

We first wrote about classic souvlaki joints a year and a half ago, and since then, those spots we recommended have only become more popular. We can’t take all the credit, however; as we mentioned in our primer, the humble dish has undergone a renaissance of sorts, and there are now all sorts of places you can find it – from hip and fashionable boîtes to traditional holes-in-the-wall. We’ve rounded up a few more that we love.

We know that there’s a trend away from gluten and carbs these days, and all we have to say to that is: more for us! In Athens, bread and pies still form the foundation, if the not the substance, of many a meal – breakfast especially. Make like a local and start your day off right with cheese pie or koulouri from one of our top picks. (These places are also perfect for a pick-me-up later in the day.)

Editor's note: Our second stop on CB's Global Bar Crawl is in Athens, where two classic old watering holes have been tending to the drinking needs of locals for decades. If there’s one realm in which Athens has improved by leaps and bounds since the economic crisis began, it may very well be the city’s bar scene. Perhaps this can be attributed to a sense of nihilism or an uncertain future, but Athens has never had so much to offer in terms of drinking. From theme bars specializing in meatballs and cocktails to boîtes with a different DJ every night to converted bistros in former fabric shops, the list of venues is endless and endlessly varied.