Athens Food Tour | Eating Like the Locals!

Welcome back. Today we are in Athens and our goal is to try as much authentic Greek food as possible. Yesterday was our first full day in Athens and we toured the old city as well as had a lot of gyros and of course gelato. But today we want to try some more authentic Greek dishes as we love Mediterranean foods. So we're currently en route to an authentic Greek restaurant. We're also going to be hitting up a bakery and just seeing how much we can possibly get. Today is the national holiday here in Greece so all the museums are closed. So it's a great day to try food but we'll also see how many of the restaurants are closed or open due to the holidays. So let's go. So we are at the restaurant and they brought us an English printed out copy of the menu and this menu honestly has so much of what I wanted to try on it. So we're gonna get some appetizers. We're gonna get some main dishes and we're gonna share a family style so we can try a lot of different things. It just started to pour so thankfully we're under a covered area right now but yeah this looks good. So all the food just came out. It looks so amazing. I hardly know where to start. So first we're gonna start with a Greek salad. So what this is is a huge block of feta that has olive oil drizzled on top. Then we also have tomato, cucumbers, olives, big chunks of onions with olive oil drizzled all over the top of it. This looks so good. I've been waiting to try this one so I'm gonna first dig into this one. Oh my gosh. We just lost a precious olive. It's piled up so high. So first I'm gonna get a bite with the feta and the cucumber. That's definitely the best block of feta I've ever had. So tasty with the olive oil over all that. Big fan of this one. So next up we have the grilled zucchini with tzatziki. Tzatziki is yogurt sauce with cucumber, olive oil of course drizzled on top. Tzatziki is my absolute favorite. We already have had some since coming here but this one looks like it has some sesame seeds on top. Wow the grilled zucchini absolutely delicious. I forgot to squeeze the lemon on top too. Got that in my eye. Wow okay I think this might be the single favorite thing I've had since coming here. The tzatziki is creamy and delicious. 10 out of 10 for this one. It's so good. So this is saganaki which is apparently just fried cheese. Ever since getting to Europe I've been eating blocks of cheese with crackers. But to fried cheese seems like an invention that I should have thought of years ago because what's better than cheese is fried cheese. That was actually somehow better than I expected it to be. Back home in Minnesota a lot of cheese curds happen. A lot of cheese curds at fairs, a lot of cheese curds at restaurants. This right here is like the purest form of cheese curds because instead of like the breading around it it's just straight up cheese and it is delicious. Next the chefs gave us complimentary some kowtung which is so sweet of them to think of us to try something new. This is nothing I would have ever ordered myself so a little nervous about trying it but here we go. Wow that's actually like really tender, really juicy, does not have a strange flavor or texture whatsoever. It's just like the tenderest piece of beef that you could imagine. Of course drizzled in olive oil. We squeezed some lemon over the top of it. It looks like it might have some type of maybe oregano or different seasoning on top as well. Really tasty. I'm really surprised by that. All right so the last appetizer we ordered is called dolmades and what it is is grape leaves that have been stuffed with rice, sometimes meat depending on whether it's vegetarian or not. There's also herbs and seasonings that are stuffed inside and then of course the whole thing is drenched in olive oil. So this is a nice pairing with some of the deep fat fried foods like the zucchini because this one's nice and fresh and also served with lemon. This one's interesting because the leaf almost tastes like wine. I'm not even kidding it has like a sweet taste to it and then it looks like this one might have some beef or something maybe some pork inside. It's pretty good and then of course we got served a loaf of bread as well. Complementary with everything that's also good to dip into the tzatziki. So now we're just going to devour all this amazing food. So the rain picked up again but we just finished our appetizers. They were absolutely delicious and for all those apps it only ended up being 20 euros so that's pretty good for four dishes which ended up being a fifth since they threw that in for free for us which was really sweet. But next we're going to walk to a bakery to satisfy our sweet tooth. So next we are at a bakery called Bayesation. So we got a famous pastry called spanakopita and what's inside of this little pastry pie is spinach and feta. This is a really famous wella pastry here more savory instead of a sweet one so we'll see how it is. I've actually had this before frozen reheated in a microwave and was not a fan but I don't think that's a fair chance so here's a fresh one from a bakery. That's really tasty it definitely tastes like a breakfast food that you would just grab on the go. It also has onions in it a very savory little pastry. I really like the breading on the outside the phyllo pastry is very crispy. This is kalori the greek take on the original turkish food simit. So what it is is just like a circular bread with a lot of sesame seeds on it. Now generally they don't have a lot of flavor so a lot of times kalori will be served with like a jelly or you can put nutella on it however this specific one actually has nutella intertwined or wrapped into the bread itself so this one should be quite flavorful. Messy street food. That one looks dry is it dry? As you can see with that first bite this is very dry I don't know if it's supposed to be like that or if this is maybe like a day or two old but very dry and like immediately I feel like I need a cup of coffee to go along with it. I really feel like it should maybe be less dry I don't know. I know the simit that we had in Turkey was like a very like coarse or dense bagel kind of what it reminded me of was a bagel that was very dense but this one's still pretty dense but just extremely dry. We are at a place I cannot even begin to pronounce so I will put the name right here. So I got a pastry called bugatsa. Now this one is supposed to have a cream inside. Rip it open and see. So it has a cream it's slightly warm and it looks like it's dusted with powdered sugar so we're gonna give it a try. Wow that's really good it's just like a buttery warm cream and then this pastry is so flaky with nice thin layers. This is probably the best pastry I've had yet. So next is tzatziki which is greek sweet bread. Now this is like the small version of it usually it's like a big braided piece of bread that has three strands that signifies the holy trinity because it's like an easter bread for the greek orthodox. This is like a smaller version of it. I can definitely see some little braids that are kind of folded in to make this bun and then it's topped with almonds and then some type of crystallized thing I'm not sure if it's sugar yeah just sugar crystals on top so we're gonna try this. It's so fluffy yeah there's definitely different strands of dough that have been folded together definitely has a sweet taste to it really fluffy would go really great with a cup of coffee so now I might need to go get some coffee. We are now at the fourth stop of the day and we have a couple of different dishes to try first up is greek yogurt. Now honestly I don't know if it's just considered yogurt here or if it is considered greek yogurt but regardless yogurt here in Greece. Now a lot of the times greek yogurt can be pretty bitter not have like a lot of flavor or a lot of taste however this one is absolutely soaked in honey and it has walnuts on top so I'm pretty sure this one's gonna be very good because there is so much honey on this one. All right first bite all I could taste was all the honey because there is so much honey on it the second bite I tried to get a little more of just like strictly the yogurt to try and get more of that taste. All right so even without all the honey it's definitely more sweet than some of the other greek yogurts I've had. I'm very used to eating like sour greek yogurt but this one's very sweet it is very thick a lot of yogurt can be very like liquidy however this one is a very thick greek yogurt delicious. All right we are ending out the food tour with the most traditional and popular dish here in Greece which is moussaka. It's basically like a lasagna just the greek version so this whole top layer here is cheese underneath it we have a layer of eggplant there's a layer of potatoes and then we have ground beef or sometimes lamb this is a massive piece I did not know how much we would get but this is a lot absolutely love eggplant so I'm excited to try this one. First bite wow that is really good it almost tastes like a shepherd's pie because the bottom layer is like some type of pastry crust it's such like a warm cozy homey meal that would be so good on like a chilly day super filling and I'm already full but wow this is like a really cozy tasty dish. It's gonna take me a while to finish this big of a portion but we hope you enjoyed this food tour through Greece of some of the most popular dishes that you can grab just walking around on the streets of Athens. We only walked about a mile and a half and were able to find all of these dishes without too much trouble even on a day when a lot of the restaurants are closed for the holiday but we hope you enjoyed and we will see you in the next one. Thanks so much for watching!