I went on a five-and-a-half-hour food tour of central Athens and need to process it all in the next day or so. In the meantime, please accept my favorite unrelated image from today's walk, in which my camera aperture met a bodiless kiosk vendor suspended in an aperture of his own, in the scrappy Omonia neighborhood. I have since returned to Omonia, and it has an undeniable energy not easily reproduced in this mostly laid-back metropolis.
My thought after visiting any taverna or ouzeri in Athens (aside from wow, my stomach is really distended) is that the cookery exudes a mature confidence. The menus tend to look similar, with kitchen staffs more interested in honing than experimenting. I can't remember ever eating this well in Europe. Granted, in the more expensive northern cities I tend to throw together quick meals on the stovetop ... but still. There's something about the intersection of sun and sea: vine-ripened vegetables, fish just pulled from the Mediterranean, and always these damned flaky cheese pastries leading me to my destruction. While I dine, I jot down observations in a notebook ― the old habit of a newspaperman. I have caught chefs and servers noticing this; it seems to gratify them. Maybe they are just amused. In a Thanksgiving act of solidarity with my countrymen, I went in search of something resembling a turkey dinner. The closest thing I could find was this slowly braised rooster in a fr...
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