‹🍽️ Eat: tavernas & restaurants›
Vibe: ● Alternative · ● Trendy · ● Classic · ● Posh · ● Must-see Price: € cheap · €€ mid · €€€ expensive (Google's per-person range) ⏸ = temporarily closed on Google
Psyri & Monastiraki
🍽️ 3Ta Karamanlidika tou Fani
🍺 beer €4.5 · 🍷 wine €4–6.50 · 🍽️ plate €6.50–8.50
A deli and charcuterie shop with a busy meze restaurant attached, serving pastirma, soutzouki, cured meats, cheeses and Anatolian-Greek small plates with ouzo, tsipouro and wine. It is built on the cured-meat traditions of the Karamanlides, Anatolian Greek-Orthodox refugees. Fanis Theodoropoulos continues his family's 1920s pastirma trade, and the restaurant has occupied its corner neoclassical building since 2014.
🍽️ 4Linou Soumpasis & Sia (LS & SIA)
A hyped modern-Greek neo-taverna and bistro in a former candle shop in Psyrri. It is dinner-focused with a natural-wine list and no cocktail menu, reservations needed, Michelin Plate 2024-2025. Opened in December 2021 by Myrsini Linou and George Soumpasis, it is also a shop, natural-candle maker and creative office, and hosts exhibitions and record launches.
🍽️ 5Cafe Avissinia
🍽️ plate €13
An old-school taverna and mezedopoleio on the Monastiraki flea-market square, mainly a sit-down meal place, on three levels with an Acropolis-view rooftop terrace. There is live folk music (accordion, piano) at weekends from September to June. Ketty Koufonikola opened it in 1986, and the interior is cluttered with antiques.
Plaka, Syntagma & historic centre
🍽️ 14Dopios
🍸 cocktail €13 · 🍺 beer €6 · 🍷 wine €6 · 🍽️ plate €14
A modern Greek meze restaurant by chef Christoforos Peskias, a sit-down dinner place with a solid cocktail and wine list. It focuses on small producers from around Greece. It has run since about 2021 under plane trees on Agion Theodoron square, beside the 11th-century church of Agioi Theodoroi.
Gazi, Kerameikos & Metaxourgeio
🍽️ 20Seychelles
🍽️ plate €12–18
Seychelles (Σεϋχέλλες) is a modern-Greek sharing-plates restaurant with outdoor tables on a lively pedestrian square in Metaxourgeio/Kerameikos. Booking is recommended. An early Athens 'bistronomy' spot, it serves ingredient-driven Greek 'soul food' with rustic-meets-urban cooking and is popular with locals and tourists.
Exarchia, Omonia & north centre
🍽️ 28To Rini
🍸 cocktail €8 · 🍺 beer €6 · 🍽️ plate €17 · ☕ coffee €2.3
A tiny chef-run all-day bistro by the National Archaeological Museum, with a quiet patio. Coffee and brunch from the morning, then modern takes on Greek comfort dishes from seasonal produce, with natural Greek wines, in the evening.
🍽️ 29Pharaoh
A lively wood-fire Greek restaurant and natural-wine bar (Michelin Bib Gourmand) with a vinyl DJ in the evenings, turning party-ish late at night. Chef Manolis Papoutsakis cooks without electricity, using wood stoves, charcoal and a wood oven. It sits behind a heavy curtain in edgy Exarchia.
🍽️ 30Lorda (Λόρδα)
🍺 beer €2.30–5.10 · 🍽️ plate €11.70–16.10
A souvlaki joint on Spyrou Trikoupi in Exarchia, built around skewers: pork, chicken, kebab, sausage, lamb, beef, plus halloumi and mushroom options for vegetarians. A skewer runs about €2.80–4.30, a pita wrap €4–5.20 and a plated portion from €11.70 (Wolt prices), with Greek beers alongside. Open from lunchtime until after midnight; Wolt customers rate it 9.0/10.
🍽️ 31I Kriti (Η Κρήτη)
A family-run Cretan taverna and rakadiko in an arcade (stoa) off Veranzerou, by Kaningos Sq. It serves home-style Cretan dishes such as apaki, Sfakian pies and liver with honey, with raki and a free dessert, using produce from Cretan cooperatives. Running for about 30 years, it is now seen as a classic.
🍽️ 32Ouzeri Lesvos
🍽️ plate €8
An unpretentious, old-fashioned Exarchia ouzeri serving fresh seafood and meze from Lesvos or cooked the Lesvos way, at modest prices. It is long-standing, crowded and mostly local.
🍽️ 33Zigoala (Ζιγκοάλα)
A modern taverna (mageirio) in Omonia by chef Vasilis Chammam, serving meze with Greek and Eastern Mediterranean cooking to laïko music. It was the hyped opening of the 2025-26 season, widely reviewed (Athinorama, Lifo, FNL) and credited with drawing food lovers to Omonia.
🍽️ 34Diporto
An unmarked basement taverna under an old neoclassical building by the Central Market, lunch only, with shared tables and cash payment. There is no menu: a few daily dishes such as legumes or chickpeas, stews, small fried fish and salad, with retsina from the barrel. It has run since 1887.
Kolonaki & Lycabettus
🍽️ 45Filippou (Taverna Filippou)
🍽️ plate €10
A classic Kolonaki taverna for lunch or dinner, not a bar, with daily-changing home-cooked dishes (mageirefta) from an open kitchen. It is a third-generation family business founded in 1923 as a basement wine shop, at its current ground-floor site since 1968.
Pangrati, Mets & Ilisia
🍽️ 61Cookoovaya
🍺 beer €9 · 🍷 wine €8 · 🍽️ plate €25
An upscale modern Greek restaurant near Evangelismos, a dinner destination with an open kitchen and a sommelier-led wine list. It opened in 2014 as a collaboration of five Greek chefs, including Periklis Koskinas, and serves generous Mediterranean dishes from small Greek suppliers. It is on Michelin and 50 Best Discovery lists.
🍽️ 62Akra
A bistronomy restaurant and bakery with an open kitchen, a counter and a wood-fired grill. It runs as a bakery-café for breakfast, with dinner as the main event. Chefs Giannis Loukakis and Spiros Pediaditakis opened it in 2023, and it holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand (since the 2024 Athens guide).
🍽️ 63Mavro Provato
🍽️ plate €9–13
A very popular modern mezedopoleio ('black sheep') in Pangrati serving small plates, grills, home-style dishes and tsipouro at fair prices. Reservations recommended. A neighbourhood favourite, with a second branch in Melissia.
Acropolis, Koukaki, Thissio & Petralona
🍽️ 68Taverna Oikonomou
🍷 wine €9 per ½ L · 🍽️ plate €12–13
An old-school Petralona taverna with home-cooked mageirefta (stuffed vegetables, rabbit stifado, beans), courtyard and street tables, and a recited menu. It has operated since the 1930s.
🍽️ 69Phita (Fita / ΦΙΤΑ)
A modern Greek gastro-taverna in Neos Kosmos, dinner-focused, with a daily-changing, seafood-heavy sharing-plate menu of seafood, vegetables and pulses from small producers, and a curated wine list. Fotis Foteinoglou and Theodoros Kassavetis opened it in 2019, and it is credited with putting Neos Kosmos on the food map.
Beyond the centre
🍽️ 78Krabo
🍺 beer €8 · 🍷 wine €10 · 🍽️ plate €17–25
A seasonal beach restaurant and bar in the small Zoska cove at Kavouri, with paid sunbeds and cabanas. Lunch under a pergola is Mediterranean seafood, pasta and meze with Greek wines, followed by sunset cocktails.
Also good for this
🍸 6Wine is Fine
🍷 wine €6–9 · 🍽️ plate €10–13
A French-bistro-style natural-wine bar that works as a small restaurant, with a full seasonal menu of French-Greek small plates and white tablecloths on pedestrian Vissis St. It is walk-in only with a long waitlist. Two Frenchmen, Rafael Wallon-Brownstone and Thomas Brengou, run it with Greek chef Stavros Chrysafidis, in a 70s-chic interior.
☕ 46Prasini Tenta
🍺 beer €7 · 🍷 wine €8 · 🍽️ plate €17–23 · ☕ coffee €4.5
A café-restaurant on the lower slopes of Lycabettus, by the footpath, with a panoramic city view. Coffee and brunch by day, cocktails and wine at sunset, and a full menu of Greek, Mediterranean and international comfort food. It has operated since 1931.
☕ 48Dexameni (café-ouzeri)
A historic open-air kafeneio under the trees of Dexameni Square: coffee in the morning, then ouzo or beer with small meze plates through the evening. It is very local. The square is named after Hadrian's 2nd-century reservoir, was a haunt of writers like Papadiamantis and Varnalis, and has a summer open-air cinema (Cine Dexameni).
🪩 51Rock'n'Roll
A bar-restaurant by day and early evening (burgers, pizza, tacos), then a crowded late party bar with DJs, party nights and live acts. A Kolonaki institution since 1987, with a mixed-age crowd from the smart Kolonaki set.
🍸 72Epta Martyres (Seven Martyrs)
🍽️ plate €5
A Neos Kosmos/Koukaki wine bar with a Volos-tsipouradiko-style kitchen and 150+ Greek and European low-intervention labels, many of them magnums, with 10+ by the glass. Small seafood and meze plates are sent out as you drink, a Volos custom. It opened in 2024 and quickly became a hangout.
🍸 73Line
🍸 cocktail €10–11 · 🍺 beer €6–7.50 · 🍷 wine €6.50–7.50 · 🍽️ plate €9–15.50
Line is the Kato Petralona bar from The Clumsies' founders, opened in 2022 in a former art gallery and run around fermentation and zero waste, including its own grape-less fruit wines called Why-Ins. In 2026 it topped the first Europe's 50 Best Bars list. Cocktails are twisted classics, served with house beers, sourdough bread and a full food menu; no DJ nights are documented, so this is a place to drink and eat rather than to dance.
🪩 79Island (Island Club & Restaurant / Island Athens Riviera)
🍸 cocktail €20 · 🍽️ plate €30–69
An upscale seaside summer restaurant and nightclub on the rocks at Varkiza: sunset dinner, then DJs and partying until early morning, with table and bottle service. It is long-running, with whitewashed Cycladic styling and sea views, a glamorous summer night out on the Riviera.