Food Tours · Tour

Athens Food Tour for Eight: Sfakiani Pie, Rakomelo and Honey

Eight people is the ceiling, which is what makes this one work: eight to ten stops in four hours, and at each one there is time to talk to whoever is behind the counter. The route runs from Syntagma to Monastiraki, and it is deliberately not a list of monuments. Pies to start, sweet and savoury, then koulouri, an organic olive oil tasting and a Greek coffee brewed the traditional way. Mitropoleos Square next, where the cathedral stands beside the Little Metropolis, a twelfth-century Byzantine church covered in carved stone. Agias Irinis square used to be the flower market and is now mostly cafés. The stop there is sfakiani, a Cretan pie thin as a crepe with soft cheese inside and honey poured over it, with rakomelo, raki warmed with honey, cardamom and cinnamon. Aiolou follows, one of the oldest streets in the city, laid out in 1833, where loukoumades have been fried in the same place for a hundred years. Then the open fish and meat market, and souvlaki from one of the few places that does it properly. Evripidou is the spice and herb street: PDO Greek cheeses, pastourma, tsipouro. Kotzia Square, ringed by neoclassical buildings and an excavated stretch of the city's two-thousand-year-old water supply, is where three kinds of Greek honey get tasted side by side. Psyri and Monastiraki close it out, past the sunken church of Pantanassa that gave the square its name. Guided in Greek or English. Vegetarians are fine except at one stop where there is no alternative to meat; vegans and gluten-free diets are not catered for.