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Published: August 14th 2014
Lithos Restaurant
Our favourite taverna in Athens It was after midnight on our last night in Athens and we had just left our new 'favourite' restaurant for the second night in a row, where my lovely husband had found his new love - Greek food!! He was in his happy place again, savouring new tastes and textures ..seriously.
Yiasou!
We are very fortunate to visit Greece with a Greek, he knows the best places to go, where and what to eat and he speaks the language! Otherwise the title of this post would have been 'it's all Greek to me'!
We arrived in Athens at lunchtime and immediately set off to find something to eat! We found a little taverna, it felt like we were in a Greek village, not a capital city. George and Jen quickly took control ordering our food for us, here's how it went...
We start with a frappe (pronounced fra pair - with a Greek twang), it's a bit like an iced coffee and it is a staple drink in Greece! It's good and kept us going when we were feeling tired from an early morning start. Next up came the Greek salad -( horiataki), the flavour in this
simple dish was delicious, baked feta (which is baked in foil and the tastiest bits are scraped off the bottom of the foil), tzaziki, made with real Greek yoghurt - very tasty, and lamb souvlaki - yum, yum, yum! Simple food filled with such flavour, you can still taste goodness hours after eating!
That night we ate more of the same kind of food at the Plaka, a touristy area underneath the acropolis. The food was good and we were entertained with Greek music and singing.
The following night, after a big day of sightseeing we stumbled across a great little restaurant about a two minute walk from our hotel. Out of the tourist area it was perfect for us, the hosts were everything you could want (they loved us! and we them in return). At this restaurant we kicked it up a notch and over the next two nights we ordered a selection of starters to share....baked feta, saganaki (cheese), eggplant salad, loukanika (sausage), tzaziki, Greek salad, calamari, grilled octopus (which apparently was so good that Michael wanted to have it again for dessert). Our hosts gave us free dessert (not octopus), and a beautiful platter of
fruit to share...they gave us a free bottle of red wine, shots of ouzo, mastika and tsiporo (all very potent Greek drinks!) As we were leaving, after midnight they wanted us to stay and share more food with them! We were so impressed with this restaurant Jen gave them a review on trip adviser, it was then we found out that this little restaurant is rated number four of 1506 restaurants in Athens!! What a find it was to find such a great place that was very reasonably priced, each night cost us 50 euros for the for of us!!
Athens is a BC city. It is one of the oldest cities in the world it has been around for some 7000 years.
During this trip we've been to some big European cities and I guess I was expecting similar of Athens - what I observed was an Athens that makes no apologies for being exactly what it is, a very very old city with history steeping through its veins, and doing it a bit tough right now. Several times I asked George if we were in the city area as I felt like we were staying in
a village, even though the village was just below the Acropolis. When we walked out of our hotel we looked up and to the right and there it was, this enormous piece of architecture with so much history attached to it and 2,500 years old!! I found myself repeating BC, BC over and over again, just to get my head around what I was looking at, walking through and getting the occasional sneaky touch of was really that old!! Pinch me. It's mind blowing!!
Of course we ticked all the big tourist attraction sites, the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus amphitheatre, we wandered around ruins scattered through the city, spent time wandering through the acropolis museum.
Next tour was to the ancient Olympic site, where I ran (read shuffled, it was very hot) around the track.
Athens is a Beauitiful City!
..How's that brother?
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Margy
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Great blog!
Another fab tale of your journey, I just really love reading your blog!