I would say that restaurants that serve good Greek cuisine in the centre of Athens are rare. Most are touristic and offer mediocre food, with poor raw materials.
This is not the case at Ateno, a new restaurant opened by the brothers Spyros and Vangelis Liakos, together with chef Nikos Karathanos, Costas Tranoulidis, and Anthoula Papageorgiou.
It is housed in a beautiful corner neoclassical building on the pedestrian street of Aiolou. On the ground floor, it hosts a deli, where you will find selected products from small Greek producers.
In the same area, there are refrigerators and showcases full of cheeses as well as well-known cured meats. With these, they make exuberant sandwiches that one can take in hand or sit at one of the tables they put out on the pedestrian street or in the atmospheric hall on the first floor.
However, our visit was not for the sandwiches—which, for the record, are worth it—but for Nikos's restaurant. Nikos is returning to the Athenian culinary scene after some time, and his return is delicious.
The dishes he prepares daily are based on traditional Greek cuisine, but they have Nikos's spiciness and more modern look. For example, the Greek salad includes a crimson, peeled tomato topped with a nice cream of feta and a dusting of Cretan nuts.
On the other hand, the fava beans are served on a crispy tart accompanied by grilled octopus, a little tomato sauce, and small touches of kumquat. These are what make the difference, giving the dish a nice, cool acidity.
Chickpeas are combined with cod in an interesting crust of lemon leaves—a dish that didn't excite me too much.
Changing the style and moving on to the pasta, I have to stop at two dishes that will definitely not be missing from my order the next time I find myself at Ateno.
The Striftaria (braid pasta), which looks like rigatoni, with the eel wrapped in lard, gruyere cream, and intense Florinis pepper sauce, was a standout.
As for the Corfu tagliatelle (made from semolina), I'll just say that they enslaved me. The richly flavoured bacon cream paired perfectly with the pasta, the black pork porkette provided the crunchy texture, and the egg completed the flavours. It is a pure comfort dish—some might say that it resembles carbonara, and they would be right—in that it is difficult to share.
And after all that, we get bream meatballs with Florinis pepper cream. A traditional dish is given a more modern and very summery version.
To close, the moussaka has delicious, light béchamel and eggplant rolls filled with aromatic ground beef.
And just like that, the centre and pedestrian street of Aiolou gets a restaurant with a Greek character that does not tread on modernism but on tradition. It gives a different, modern side of Greek cuisine—the one that we should show to the thousands of tourists who now visit Athens.
Info:
52 Aiolou & Miltiadou, tel. 2103 223 223
Price: 25 – 35 euros without wine
Vasilis Dimaras is a columnist for Cantina. Translated by Paul Antonopoulos.
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