Athens Food Tours and Greek Cooking Classes

Monastiraki is the hinge of the old city: the flea market, the square, the tavernas that face the Acropolis, and the highest concentration of visitors. It is where most tours meet and where the prices are highest.

Psyrri, a few streets north, was a workshop district and is now where Athens goes out. Mezedopoleia, small plates, wine by the carafe, and it fills up late.

Plaka, under the Acropolis, is the postcard: whitewashed lanes, bougainvillea, and restaurants that have been serving visitors for a century. Prices reflect the address.

Koukaki, south of the hill, is the residential one, quieter and cheaper, and it is where several of the smaller operators run their evening tours precisely because the others do not.

The central market on Athinas Street is where the city has bought meat and fish for well over a century. It is loud, it is not decorative, and the fish hall in particular is the reason to go: whole fish on crushed ice, shouted prices, and a set of small restaurants inside that serve the market's own workers, several of them through the night.

Here is what we cannot tell you, and we would rather say so. No official source publishes its opening hours or its closing day. The tourist board says it has not shut a day since 1886, which is also the year of an unrelated decree involving the same benefactor's name, so even the founding date should be treated carefully. Every set of hours you will find online, including on large sites, traces back to nothing.

What is safe: go in the morning, expect it to be quiet on Sundays, and let a guide handle the timing if the market is the reason you booked.

Separately, Athens has around 195 laikés agorés, the street markets that set up in a different neighbourhood each day of the week, from dawn until they pack up around three in the afternoon. They are run by the regional authority rather than the city. Ask your accommodation which day yours is: it is the cheapest and most ordinary food experience in Athens.

Useful for judging whether a 79 EUR tour is worth it, and useful for the rest of the week.

A pita wrap with gyros is about 3.20 to 4.60 euros in Athens, taken away. A kalamaki, the small skewer, is 2.40 to 3.70. A frappé is around 2.10 and a takeaway espresso freddo about 2.50. A koulouri, the sesame ring sold from carts every morning, is 70 to 90 cents.

Sitting down changes all of these substantially, and the reason is fiscal rather than commercial: table service carries 24% VAT against 13% for takeaway. A gyros served at a table in a tourist square can be 13.90 euros, which is not a scam, it is a different product with a different tax rate and a chair.

So the arithmetic of a food tour here is: 79 euros buys you about four hours and eight to twelve tastings that would cost perhaps 25 euros on your own. The rest is the guide, the route and the explanation, which in a city with this much bad tourist food is worth something real.

Six of the fourteen cooking classes are held on a terrace or somewhere with the Acropolis in sight, and the obvious assumption is that the view is what you pay for. We checked, and it is not.

Every one of those six costs between 59 and 100 EUR. The two most expensive classes on the page, at 162 EUR each, have no view at all: both are private lessons in an Athenian home, one taught by a cook who came out of a local cookery school and bakery, the other by a chef who spent seven years cooking privately on the islands. What the premium buys is a kitchen to yourself and a person who has done this for a living, which is a more defensible thing to sell than a skyline.

That reverses the usual advice. If you want the view, take the 59 EUR class with the roof garden and spend the difference on dinner. If you want to learn something, the money is in the private lessons, and the Acropolis will still be there when you come down.

One of the two, incidentally, is a filo pastry specialist, and hand stretched filo is genuinely difficult, satisfying and close to impossible to learn from a video.