GIANT Greek Meat Feast - Food in Athens!

Hey everyone, it's Mark Wiens. I'm in Athens, Greece, and today we're on our way to go meet some friends, Vivian and Diana, and they're gonna take us to a couple of different restaurants for lunch today, so some delicious Greek food coming up. We have decided to take the bus, because the bus goes right exactly where we need to go for lunch today, so we're waiting on bus number 550. Taking the bus was fairly straightforward. Just followed the map from Google Maps directions. The plan is we're gonna go to two back-to-back restaurants for lunch today. The first is a grilled meat restaurant, and the second is a seafood, a fish restaurant. Hello, welcome, nice to meet you. Hello, how are you? Nice to meet you. Hi. Gineka, too? And here, they have excellent. What's the name of it? Agrinio. What's the name of the city? Very good. In Greece, in Stereola, in Greece. That's where they come from. Famous for the meat. Yes. And this here? This is pork spit. That's ready, that's how it's served. This is traditional food. Agrinio. Yeah. And what, wow. Agrinio city. This is a village, Potamoula. Okay. For you, village. Okay. Wow. My brother, my sister. It's a family. It's family. Family business. This is ready, this is hot now. Okay. I'm tasting the Greek lemon. Greek lemon. Yeah. Thank you. And is that oregano? It's natural. Wow. Okay. Thank you. Okay. We got a gigantic platter of meat coming to our table right now. Oh, this is a family run meat restaurant and it's so much fun. They fix everything. Wow. We got the mixed platter of meat. They take some cuts from all of those different rolls, chop them up into pieces and you can see them just like dripping with and oozing with juices and then he piles them, all the different meats onto a piece of paper and then that's not all. It's then topped with a bunch of French fries then sprinkled with salt and oregano and some Greek lemons on it. It's just all eaten family style. You can just dig in with your fingers or with a fork and just grab meat and fries and bread and oh, you can smell the oregano on there. This is the meat innards roll up. There's liver and lungs on the inside and then it's wrapped with intestines and then slow roasts and this thing has a, it has a little bit of an irony aroma to it and I love it. It's one of my, it's one of the greatest organ treasures you could eat. Oh yeah. I would love that when you do that. I would love it. Oh, it's just salted perfectly. It's not all that irony. It's really like clean, like organ tasting. It's fantastic. It's rich. It's definitely rich. Look at that chunk of meat. There's oregano on this one and as I lifted up that fork full, it just completely stripped off. It's so tender. Wow. It's so tender. Oh, do I have something in my hair? Literally, I could not even use my teeth for that. I could chew with my gums with that meat. What I like about the grilled meats in Greece is that they're salted kinda heavily but it tastes really, really good. That's the village where you are from? Oh, okay. Potamoula, which means small river. Yeah. Oh, okay. That's where the recipes originate from her grandfather. I'm trying the chicken now and you can see that golden, golden crust. Oh, the chicken is extremely soft as well. That was a huge bite of chicken, too. And the final meat to complete the quadro of meats on the paper tray is the fatty pork, which they have mentioned is one of the Greek favorites. Yeah, oh, it's stunning. It has that crust of salt and herb on it and it's so incredibly flavorful, the way it's been slow-roasted. We got some tzatziki, which is Greek yogurt with cucumber and it is a dip. You can actually dip anything you want from the feast into the tzatziki, so a fry looks pretty good. You can taste the dill in there and it's a little bit garlicky and what I love about it is it's so cool and refreshing. The other, which is a dip of feta with peppers, hot peppers. And let's try this. This will be my first time tasting this. Oh, it's like a, it tastes kind of like cottage cheese dip. It's really fragrant, really rich and that's delicious, as well. Really? Whoa. Ah, it's all from the village. Wow. Yes, we finished with that meat feast. That was the definition of just a melt-in-your-mouth platter, a gigantic paper full of meat. It was amazing, just all things meaty and tender, all on a single piece of paper with fries on top. That was incredible. Oh, it's sweet and kind of, it has like a mesquite. It has like a, almost like a pine mastic tree. Ah, with a chunk of watermelon. Oh, it's so juicy. Thank you. Bye-bye, my guy. Thank you very much, thank you. Very good. This is an amazing restaurant. The owners, it's family-run. The owners are extremely friendly. The food is incredible. And normally they were saying that the restaurant will be packed, but now is the holidays in Greece, so that's why it's not too full and also we ate kind of early. But the food, the meat, this is where you can come in Greece to have a Greek meat feast. Are you okay there in the back? Yes, very nice. We're on our way to the next restaurant to eat some fish. Hello. This is Vaja, Omar. Hello. And this is Ruki, he made it too. The restaurant is called Moskos and it's in a residential area. It's nice and quiet. They have tables set up all outside. This is already a fantastic restaurant. We're gonna be eating underneath the lemon trees and the mandarin trees. Vivian and Diana are just ordering all the food. There's nothing better than having back-to-back feasts, a meat feast and then a seafood feast. And once again, the table is just full of seafood. I just had a chance to go back in the kitchen where Auntie is grilling up the seafood and she's grilling some of the octopus right now, some of the octopus that we're eating on the table. And it's just gigantic octopus, all of those tentacles. She grills them for three hours and then slices it up for the dish we have on the table. She adds some olive oil and vinegar and oregano and salt and that's it. And it's that slow roast that gives it the flavor and that smokiness over that hot fire. That's incredible. Oh, that's amazing. You can taste a little bit of lemon juice. The oregano on there, it's nicely salted. You can taste the grill marks on it and maybe just a little bit of olive oil on there. That is just simple, simple, perfect. And squeeze on some of that fresh lemon. Oh, oh, that's so good because it's fried so fresh. And that one, you can eat the bones and all. It's soft all the way through. It's meaty, it's, mm. Next up for the calamari. And, oh, they're just big and beautiful. And the whole plate was just, it's just like exploding with calamari. Freshly deep fried. Oh, and it's so soft and tender that you can cut it with your fork. You don't need a knife to cut it. And then just add on a little bit, it looks like there's a very light breading to it before it's deep fried. Maybe just a dust of flour. Whoa. What I like about it is it's just lightly battered so that you can get an extra crispiness, but not, it's not a heavy batter. Oh, wow. That's the cod. And Valia insisted that we order it because she said they brought it to her fresh this morning and it's delicious. And the last dish that the owner just brought out is some fried cod. And normally I would think of cod as a big fish, but these are medium-sized fish, quite small, perfect for eating. They're deep fried again. I love how they serve everything with a whole half a lemon on the side. Everything is fresh. And the owner recommended that we order the cod because it's fresh, very fresh right now. And so when the owner makes a recommendation, you take that recommendation. And it looks fantastic. And immediately you can feel how soft and how flaky that fish is. Look, oh, it just flakes off the body. I think I might give it a little tiny squeeze of lemon just to enhance it. Okay, perfect. Oh yeah, that texture. That texture, it's so flaky. And every single flake is moist. And, wow, it's kind of silky. It's a little bit, you can taste some of those fish oils in there. And again, it's just cooked perfectly. It's fried fresh. All you need is salt and lemon. And that's superb. It's flaky as well. And it has that same just light coating for to make it crunchy and deep fried. Tiro kafteri, which means hot cheese. Another thing that I'm loving here is called the, it's the tiro kafterin, is that correct? And it literally translates to cheese hot. And it is, it's like a dip that you can actually dip anything in. You can dip your seafood in, you can dip vegetables, you can dip bread into it. Whatever you want. I'm especially loving the zucchini. Oh yeah. It's just this amazing creamy cheese flavor. But at the same time, like in your aftertaste, you get a little bit of a chili heat. Just very slight. We finished with the seafood feast. It was absolutely incredible. The owner has brought us out a plate of fresh melon. I love how in Greece they give you a complimentary, just a fruit dessert. Oh. That melon. It's so juicy. Almost with that slight honey taste to it. And it just gushes with juice. Those are back to back outstanding meals. And not only is the food good here, but I love how they just, even though we're somewhere, well I'm not totally sure where we are, but we're somewhere in the middle of Athens. It almost feels, it's so quiet in this area that it almost feels like we're on a Greek island here. We just drove over to the center of Athens near to Syntagma Square, and we're going to go to a place where Diana and Vivian say it's the best ice cream in Athens. Okay, we got a bunch of different ice creams and we're sitting in the car now. This one is with figs, right? This one is the figs, figs. Fresh. Mascarpone. Mascarpone cheese. Oh, that's the cheese. Wow. That is really good. It's really rich and creamy. And you can taste just those, you can taste the real pieces of figs in there as well. Pistachio? Pistachio. Oh my God. Pistachio is amazing. Really nice and strong pistachio. And then lemon. Oh, you can see little pieces of real lemon or lime peel. Oh, the lemon's amazing. Really strong flavor. Really refreshing. We just got dropped off by Vivian and Diana, and by the way, they have a design company called Two is Company, and they watch our videos. They're really amazing. They love to eat. They're really amazing people. And I wanna say a big thank you to both of them for taking us around and for showing us a couple of outstanding restaurants in Athens. To complete the afternoon today, I have decided to take a walk over to the Roman Agora. I could use some exercise this afternoon. So I'm gonna, I'm walking over there now. An Agora is a Greek meeting place. It's one of the central places of the ancient city. And unfortunately, I actually got here too late. They're closed already this evening. But that's okay, because you can almost see the entire, luckily the gate is very low. You can actually see almost the entire Agora. Most of it is in ruins, and there are columns. But you can walk around the gate, actually, and get a really good view of almost everything. And also you can see the Acropolis up on the rock formation, rock mountain above it. And one more site to see over here is Hadrian's Library. Hadrian's Library, again, it's closed, but actually you can get a pretty, a fantastic view of the entire complex and all the ruins right from the gate. I love to admire how they were able to construct the crosspost, the lintels across the columns. It's really an architectural and construction feat when you think about how old the ruins are. To finish off the day, I am walking around Monastiraki, which is known for being a flea market area. There are all sorts of shops within these lanes. It's a nice square as well to just walk through. So I'm gonna end the video, though, for today right now. It's been another fantastic day in Athens. I wanna say a huge thank you to Vivian and Diana for taking Ying and I out to eat at some local Athens Greek food restaurants. Both restaurants, both the meat feast and the seafood feast today were fantastic. Hello. And it was a lot of fun to hang out with them, so I wanna say a big thank you to them. And thank you very much for watching this video. Please remember to give it a thumbs up if you enjoyed it. Oh, hi, nice to meet you. And if you're not already subscribed, click Subscribe now for lots more food and travel videos. Goodbye from Athens. I'll see you on the next video.