Best Restaurants in Athens: Fine Dining, Local Gems & Where to Eat

Few cities eat quite like Athens. Not in the way Paris eats – with self-conscious ceremony – nor like Tokyo, where dining is close to religion. Athens eats the way Athenians live: with noise and argument and olive oil, with a genuine belief that food is not a meal but an occasion, and that an occasion should last at least three hours. What this city has that nowhere else quite manages is the combination of ancient ingredient culture – honey from Mount Hymettus, fava from Santorini, octopus dried in the Aegean sun – with a culinary ambition that has, quietly and without asking for anyone’s permission, produced one of Europe’s most interesting fine dining scenes. The best restaurants in Athens span Michelin-starred tasting menus, smoke-blackened wood ovens in backstreet Exarcheia, and open-air seafood tables overlooking the marina at Piraeus. The range is genuinely absurd. In the best possible way.

The Fine Dining Scene: Athens at the Top Table

There was a time when serious food writers would have politely declined to include Athens in any European fine dining conversation. That time has passed. The city now has a clutch of restaurants operating at a level that would turn heads in any capital, and the 2025 FNL Best Restaurant Awards confirmed what regular visitors to Athens have suspected for some years: this is a city cooking at the very highest level.

The place to start any serious discussion is CTC Urban Gastronomy in Metaxourgio, where Michelin-starred chef Alexandros Tsiotinis has constructed something quietly extraordinary in the courtyard of a neoclassical building. The flagship experience is the Voyage – an 11-course tasting menu that applies French technique to Greek ingredients with a precision that never tips into showing off. The result is Greek haute cuisine that feels genuinely Greek rather than French cuisine wearing a Greek costume. CTC holds two stars in the 2025 FNL Best Restaurant Awards, making it one of the most decorated addresses in the country. Book well in advance. Weeks, not days.

Hytra, located in the centre of Athens, occupies similar territory – Michelin-starred, imaginative, and deeply committed to locally sourced ingredients – but approaches Greek haute cuisine from a different angle. Where CTC is precise and architectural, Hytra is more sensory and layered, building dishes from varied flavour combinations that stay with you longer than you expect. It, too, is recognised in the 2025 FNL Best Restaurant Awards as a Greek Haute Cuisine destination, and its bar programme is worth arriving early for.

Then there is Cookoovaya, near the Hilton in Ilissia, where chef Periklis Koskinas takes the concept of shareable plates and applies genuine culinary intelligence to it. The name means owl in Greek – an apt choice, given the wisdom applied to dishes like grilled octopus with fava or tarama with grilled phyllo. These are flavours any Greek grandmother would recognise, constructed with a sophistication she might not. Cookoovaya holds two stars in the 2025 FNL Best Restaurant Awards and has the rare quality of feeling accessible and elevated at the same time. The room has energy. People actually smile.

Hidden Gems: Where Athenians Actually Eat

Not everything worth eating in Athens comes with a tasting menu and a sommelier. Some of the most memorable meals in this city happen in places that don’t bother with Instagram aesthetics or curated playlists – places that have been feeding the neighbourhood for decades and see no particular reason to change.

For an experience that sits somewhere between hidden gem and fully-formed restaurant revelation, Pharaoh in Exarcheia deserves a special mention. Chef Manolis Papoutsakis runs a kitchen that has earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand and, more importantly, has earned the fierce loyalty of everyone who has eaten there. The menu changes daily based on whatever is fresh and seasonal; dishes are cooked in wood ovens; the room is raw concrete, zinc bar, neon light, and stacks of firewood. It should not work as well as it does. It absolutely works. This is the feel-good, back-to-roots Greek cooking that the city has always done best, pushed forward by a chef who understands that tradition and creativity are not opposites. Exarcheia itself is one of Athens’ most characterful neighbourhoods – bohemian, political, slightly chaotic – and Pharaoh fits its backstreet address perfectly.

Beyond these named tables, Athens rewards wandering. The neighbourhood of Psiri – just below Monastiraki – has a concentration of small tavernas that serve mezedes the way they were meant to be served: in quantity, at low tables, with wine poured from ceramic pitchers. Avoid anything with a laminated photograph menu near the Acropolis. This is not so much advice as a rule.

Seafood and the Waterfront: Dining at Piraeus

For seafood in Athens, the conversation begins and ends with Varoulko Seaside at the Mikrolimano Marina in Piraeus. It holds a Michelin star and is consistently ranked among the finest seafood restaurants in all of Greece – a claim that, given the competition, is not made lightly. The waterfront setting provides a view of bobbing boats and open water that would make even a modest meal feel like an occasion. The food is considerably more than modest. Chef Lefteris Lazarou has spent decades perfecting the art of letting excellent fish taste like what it is, with technique applied in service of the ingredient rather than in competition with it.

The Mikrolimano Marina itself is worth the short journey from the city centre – a crescent of water lined with restaurants and fishing boats, where Athenians come to spend a long Sunday afternoon in the manner they have perfected over generations. If you are visiting Athens in summer, the coastal road south toward Glyfada and Vouliagmeni offers further excellent options, with open-air tables that catch the evening breeze off the Saronic Gulf. Several beach clubs along this stretch have developed food programmes serious enough to justify a visit that begins before sunset and extends considerably beyond it.

What to Order: Dishes Worth Knowing

The Greek menu can be bewildering in its apparent simplicity. Everything sounds straightforward until you eat it properly and realise that a great taramasalata bears essentially no relationship to the pale pink paste sold in British supermarkets. A few dishes reward particular attention.

Fava – the yellow split pea puree from Santorini – is one of Greece’s most underrated pleasures, especially when finished with raw onion, capers, and a serious pour of olive oil. Grilled octopus is ubiquitous but, when done well (sun-dried, then chargrilled), transcends its own cliché. Tarama – cured fish roe, properly made – is rich, faintly briny, and nothing like the version you grew up with. Spanakopita from a good bakery in the morning is arguably the finest breakfast in the city. Loukoumades – honey-drenched dough fritters – are the appropriate ending to almost any evening.

Lamb, slow-cooked until it surrenders entirely, appears in various forms across Athens’ tavernas and remains one of the city’s most reliable pleasures. On the fine dining circuit, watch for modern interpretations of Greek classics – the chefs at CTC, Hytra, and Cookoovaya are all doing interesting things with ingredients that have existed on this peninsula for three thousand years. There is something pleasingly Athenian about that.

Wine, Ouzo and What to Drink

Greek wine has spent decades being underestimated and has responded by becoming genuinely excellent. The indigenous grape varieties are worth exploring: Assyrtiko from Santorini – mineral, high-acid, and thrillingly good with seafood – is the one most visitors encounter first and rarely forget. Xinomavro from northern Greece is the red that rewards patience and pairs beautifully with lamb. Moschofilero is the aromatic white for warm evenings on a terrace when something light and floral seems like the right idea.

In the tavernas of Psiri and Monastiraki, tsipuro – the Greek pomace spirit, similar to Italian grappa but smoother – arrives unbidden at the end of meals as a gesture of hospitality. Refusing it is, technically, possible. Most people don’t bother. Ouzo is the more famous export, served over ice and turning appropriately cloudy, and best consumed before food rather than after. The natural wine movement has taken firm hold in Athens, and several bars in Koukaki and Metaxourgio stock lists that would satisfy the most committed natural wine enthusiast (and confuse everyone else, which seems to be part of the appeal).

Food Markets: Athens for Serious Eaters

The Athens Central Market – the Varvakios Agora on Athinas Street – is one of the city’s great sensory experiences and, depending on your constitution, either completely exhilarating or mildly alarming. The meat and fish halls operate with brisk, unsentimental efficiency. The surrounding streets are lined with stalls selling spices, olives, honey, dried herbs, and the kind of produce that makes you wish you had checked luggage. Go in the morning, go on an empty stomach, and go with the understanding that this is where professional chefs and home cooks alike have shopped for over a century.

For a slightly more composed experience, the weekly farmers’ markets – the laiki agora – operate in different neighbourhoods on different days and offer an excellent window into what Athenians actually buy and cook at home. The Kolonaki and Kifissia markets attract a more affluent local clientele and tend to stock superior produce, including exceptional olive oils, regional cheeses, and honey varieties that make a serious case for being the finest in Europe.

Reservation Tips and Practical Notes

Athens dining operates on a timeline that takes some adjustment for visitors accustomed to earlier service. Locals rarely sit down before nine in the evening; peak service at most serious restaurants runs from ten until midnight. Arriving at seven will get you a table without difficulty and a faint sense that you have come to the wrong city. This is not a criticism. It is simply the rhythm of the place, and once you adjust, it makes perfect sense. Dinner is not a prelude to the evening. It is the evening.

For the top tables – CTC Urban Gastronomy, Hytra, Varoulko Seaside – reservations should be made several weeks in advance, particularly in the spring and summer months when Athens draws significant visitor numbers. The Voyage tasting menu at CTC in particular books out quickly. Pharaoh in Exarcheia operates a more informal system but rewards early planning nonetheless.

Most fine dining restaurants in Athens have English menus and English-speaking staff; the hospitality is, without exception, genuine rather than performed. A note on dress: Athens is a stylish city, and its better restaurants reflect that, but the formality is relaxed rather than rigid. Smart casual is the working assumption. Leave the linen shorts for the beach clubs.

For those staying in a luxury villa in Athens, many properties offer the option of a private chef – which transforms the food market experience entirely, since you can wander the Varvakios Agora in the morning and have whatever caught your eye that evening prepared in your own kitchen, with the city to yourself. It is, frankly, one of the better ways to eat in Athens. And the competition, as this guide suggests, is fierce.

For more on the city beyond the table – where to go after dinner, which neighbourhoods to explore, and how to time a visit to the Acropolis without the crowds – see our full Athens Travel Guide.