Kapnikarea, a tiny music café-restaurant, takes its name from the Byzantine church nearby in the middle of Ermou Street. The street, dedicated to Hermes – a god of many attributes, including trade, thievery and smooth talking – and thronged with tourists and shoppers day and night, is an unlikely location for this unusual eatery. You might expect it in neighborhoods like Psyrri or Exarchia, where the eccentric is commonplace, but not opposite H&M and in the same zone as Zara and Marks & Spencer. In all fairness, Kapnikarea was there first. And when it opened in 1977, it was an avant-garde sandwich shop, a pioneer in the land of souvlaki and spanakopita. This version of fast food barely existed back then although it caught on fast. Nineteen years later, Dimitris Sofos took over the shop from his father and completely transformed it.

The subject of frequent arguments over who actually invented it, baklava has a history as multilayered as the flaky dessert itself. The story may actually go all the way back to the 8th century BCE and the Assyrians, who layered bread dough with chopped nuts and honey and baked the result – a kind of proto-baklava – in wood-burning ovens. Perhaps carried by the winds of trade, different versions of this ancient dessert appeared on Greece’s shores a few centuries later. The 3rd-century-CE Deipnosophistae ("Banquet of the Learned") – sometimes referred to as the oldest surviving cookbook – provides the recipe for gastrin, aka Cretan “Glutton Cake,” a sweet that also seems to presage the arrival of baklava as we know it. The instructions, attributed to Chrysippus of Tyana, one of the leading dessert experts of antiquity, calls for turning various chopped nuts, boiled honey and poppy and sesame seeds into a paste which is then spread between two sheets of thin, rectangular dough. At a certain point, ancient Greek cooks started using thinner sheets of pastry, better known as phyllo – Greek for “leaf” – getting closer to today’s baklava.

The quiet neighborhood where Makalo is located, right between Syntagma and Plaka, is home to some good restaurants (such as old-fashioned Paradosiako) and even to a strip of ethnic joints located on bustling Apollonos Street. Considering the area’s proximity to some of the biggest hotels in Athens and to the ultra-touristy Plaka, however, it’s rather surprising that not many visitors have caught on to the charms of Makalo, a local hangout with a fun vibe and great Greek-style cocktails.

In terms of greenness, Athens doesn’t even come close to other European capitals, with their verdant parks and blossoming gardens. The truth is, modern urban development has not been particularly gentle with this city. Numerous concrete buildings, along with poor road design, hem in inhabitants and visitors with featureless views.

Editor’s note: This is the second piece in our series featuring the hidden gems in some of Athens’ most touristy neighborhoods. We previously explored Psyri; it is now time to take on the holy grail of Athenian tourism: Plaka. There’s a reason why this area of old Athens, just below the Acropolis, is the city’s most touristy neighborhood: it has a history of more than 6,000 years.

Considering Athens’ position as a top tourist destination, it may come as a surprise that it is only recently that local museums have decided to up their game when it comes to their dining offerings. Worldwide, a good restaurant and café are now considered part of the whole museum-going experience, but it took a little time for Athenian museums to catch on to that, though catch on they have.

Dear Culinary Backstreets, I keep hearing about Greek coffee but is it any different from Turkish coffee? And do most Greeks actually drink Greek coffee these days or do they drink other types of coffee? Greek coffee is exactly the same as Turkish coffee – and it was in fact called just that in Greece until Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, at which point, for political reasons, the Greeks decided to rename their coffee “Greek coffee.” The process and preparation, though, are identical to the Turkish way.

Ah, the joys of Plaka! That most beautiful of Athens neighborhoods, full of sights for visitors to behold: Neoclassical buildings, views of the Acropolis and the Parthenon, tourist trap restaurants full of plastic, overpriced food. Joking aside, by all means go to Plaka, walk around, laugh at the kitschy copies of Ancient Greek statues depicting men with priapic erections. Then walk back to Syntagma and eat at Paradosiako.