Eating in Greece is much more than the act of maintaining one’s strength or even one’s health. Eating is an act of sharing, communicating, and showing you care. In Greek, the word for comrades or the word that means “couple” is the Greek word “syntrophy” (syntrophic), which means the ones who eat together.
Whether it is street food, fast food, or traditional dishes which should be cooked slowly at low temperatures as my grandmother used to say, Greeks want their food to be tasty.
When you are in Athens these are the 10 best dishes you should try.
1. Souvlaki – the popular choice
The king of easy-fast-tasty-traditional food in Athens is souvlaki!
Souvlaki is a complete meal. With meat pitta bread and vegetables the only thing left to decide upon is the quantity. Start in a conservative order of one or two per person as they seem to get bigger and bigger in the past few years.
Souvlaki refers to hunks of pork, lamb, or chicken, spit-roasted for hours. One needs to add of course the key sauce tzatziki made of yogurt, cucumber, and garlic. With onions and tomatoes in the pita, a hot freshly baked oiled and fried bread-dough you have your souvlaki ready to eat.
Nowadays, people tend to add potatoes to everything. Those who know best, order their souvlaki without them.
Tip: In Athens, one can find a vegan souvlaki option. It is called “pediko”. The word means “for kids” and it has everything in it but the meat. In most cases, the price is the same as the original one.
2. Horiatiki Salad
An indispensable part of any traditional lunch or dinner for Greeks, we were surprised to watch tourists have it as a main dish.
Horiatiki salad means the salad of the villager. Many times you will find it on menus worldwide as Greek Salad.
The rich taste comes from the freshness of the ingredients. Tomatoes, crispy cucumbers, red onions, green peppers, rich Kalamata olives topped by Greek feta cheese, aromatic oregano, and extra virgin olive oil make up this simple but very tasty and fulfilling salad.
Tip: Do not throw away horiatiki salad leftovers. Surely, you will not eat it the next day (who would want to eat yesterday’s cucumbers?) but you can add it to your pot while cooking for example your gemista!
3. Moussaka
Moussaka is probably the most famous dish of traditional Greek food.
There are endless variations of it. I have even seen it in the UK as … a soup! But, for sure, that was not moussaka.
Moussaka is a layered dish with potatoes at the bottom, eggplants, zucchinis after that, and then a layer of minced meat. The meat can be either pork or veal, and it is enriched by tomatoes, cooked with red wine, and spiced with cinnamon, salt, and pepper. The layers are then topped with creamy béchamel sauce.
It is a traditional Sunday dish in Greek families everybody enjoys.
4. Grilled Octopus
In many cases, you will find it is caught and served on the same day. In restaurants, you will have it grilled over hot coals topped with a squeeze of lemon and some vinegar.
You add of course olive oil and oregano. The texture should be tender and the taste salty-sweet.
You will see octopuses hanging in front of restaurants next to the beach whether you are in the Greek islands or the Athens Riviera for example in Kastella or the Peiraiki coast at the Piraeus port.
Do you want the same tasty result but do not have the hot coals? Easy!
Tip for cooking octopus at home (This is my uncle George’s recipe who used to be a brilliant cook):
1. Put the octopus in a pot at a very low temperature and leave it for about an hour or more. The low temperature for a kitchen ranking from zero to three would be 0.5 or 1.
2. You will see after a while that there is liquid in the casserole. And a lot of it! Just leave the covered pot as is and do nothing but wait. Add nothing. The “octopus’ water” will be absorbed again by the octopus and it will become very soft.
3. Remove it from the pot and put it on a tray inside your highly heated oven. It needs no more than five to seven minutes, to your grill and you have a tender tasty octopus that is crispy on the outside!
4. Add lemon, oregano, and olive oil. Enjoy!
5. Fasolada (bean soup)
The staple winter dish going back to the ancient Greeks, fasolada, is still Greece’s most popular soup. The ingredients are white medium-sized beans and carrots, onions, tomatoes, and oregano. All simmered in stock until tender, then topped with a crucial ingredient, extra virgin olive oil.
Fasolada is also served cold in summertime, as a meze with ouzo, white dry wine, or a cold beer.
Tip: Fasolada used to be the poor man’s food as the main ingredient, beans, are quite cheap to buy. But as typical households devote less time to cooking nowadays, fasolada has become a delicacy much appreciated usually on a Greek tavern night out.
6. Kokoretsi
A dish whose place of origin is the Byzantine Empire where it is first met with the name “plechti” meaning wrapped.
Kokoretsi consists of lamb or goat intestines wrapped around a seasoned variety of organ meats such as lungs, kidneys, and hearts.
After being cleaned very well with water and soaked for hours with lemon, vinegar, salt, garlic, pepper, and olive oil, it is wrapped on a skewer and grilled for hours over coals until it drips with flavor juices.
EU food standards have placed some restrictions on the marketing of “high-risk” parts of meat, (in force since 1 October 2000) but this has not deterred kokoretsi consumption. Greeks continue to serve it year-round, even though it is mostly consumed during the Sunday Easter family table.
Tip: Kokoretsi sounds difficult to prepare. That is why we leave it for the professionals. One can buy ready-to-cook kokoretsi in any big butcher shop in Athens.
7. Kokkinisto
This is another typical Sunday dish or a classic taverna dish. The name means “red sauced”.
Kokkinisto is lamp, chicken, or pork, cooked with many tomatoes, some red wine, and herbs in a clay pot which keeps in all the moisture and flavor. The tender meat should fall off the bone at the mere touch of the fork.
Very well suited to be served with french fries or white rice.
Tip: The more spices you add to your kokkinisto, the better it is.
8. Pittes (pies)
Pittes, which is the Greek word for pies, came to Greece from Turkey and the Middle East.
This is our favorite Athens everyday street food. Cheese pies, spinach pies, meat pies, chicken pies, and anything else that can be put into a pie, Greeks will most probably find wonderful. There are also the famous feta cheese pies and the ones with herbs and vegetables.
The popular version you will easily find will be based on the famous fillo crust, dozens of layers of paper-thin dough, with butter or olive oil and baked to perfection. But in some cases, the crust may be thicker. It is a matter of personal taste, there is no right or wrong answer there.
There are also sweet types of fillings with honey, walnut, and rosewater baklava sweets.
Tip: If someone offers you feta cheese pie with honey, take it.
9. Stifado
This rich and tender stew contains rabbit meat and onions. Lots of them.
This dish originates from the mountains of northern Greece where it still warms villagers every winter. The rabbit is spiced with cloves and cinnamon.
Stifado’s most wonderful characteristic is an unusual sweetness achieved by the addition of lots of small onions cooked until caramelized.
Stifado can be cooked with other kinds of meat like veal or chicken since some just do not like to eat rabbit meat.
Tip: Even if you do not eat meat, try the onions. You will not regret it!
10. Gemista
Gemista simply means “stuffed”.
Greeks prepare this typical summer dish by stuffing tomatoes, aubergines, zucchini, and peppers with ingredients like rice, herbs, tomatoes (yes for the stuffing too), spices, and sometimes raisins and pine nuts.
In gemista, some may add mincemeat as well, but this is a waste of a lovely meat-free dish.
If you want to eat as locals do, just leave out the top and eat all the tomato or aubergine, not just the filling.
Tip: Vine leaves can be stuffed too with rice, mincemeat, and herbs. This dish is called dolmadakia.