Voula’s newest Italian arrival offers sophisticated street dining with surprisingly friendly prices, discovers Amanda Dardanis. Time was when one’s culinary ambitions in Voula square rarely exceeded a lazy Sunday lunch with family and friends at a modest taverna. Or a mid-week break from the kitchen at one of the southern subu...
Read moreLeonard Cohen, Hydra's most famous son, would have been 86 this week. Hydra also gave Leonard Cohen the love of his life, Marianne Ihlen, a Norwegian beauty who inspired two of his famous songs, “Bird on the Wire” and “So long, Marianne”. This beautiful extract from an article written by David Remnick in the New Yorker – one of the last s...
Read moreMeg Cope had been a London eye surgeon for nearly two decades when her youngest child Zac was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2012. What followed is an uplifting tale of a life re-designed: and one which led the glamorous mother-of-three to a new home in Athens and an exciting new luxury fashion venture, Zaccys, named after her son, (in which...
Read moreLa Pantera Negra screams rebellion. And defies definition. Everything from the bold neon sign that shrieks «I do not give a f*&k» to the explosion of flavours that Chef Dimitris Katrivesis’ itinerant cuisine provokes, La Pantera Negra is an original, animated addition to the Athenian foodscape. With an almost guerilla like...
Read moreHis lemon pie has made him a star in France (and was rated second at the 2007 Palmarès). Arnaud Larher was crowned the official “patissier” of Grande Bretagne earlier this year, and visits the capital once a week to weave his memorable magic. What is it that make your pastries so famous around the world? To explain, I will take...
Read morePamper your tastebuds at these downtown dining hotspots that are anything but ordinary… Nolan At Nolan, Chef Sotiris Kontizas masterfully blends shades of Japan, Vietnam, Korea and China with indigenous Greek touches like an in-demand Hollywood make-up artist. Five years ago, this kind of exciting Asian-Greek culinary...
Read moreThese are exciting times for the Athens hotel landscape. After five painful years of crisis, and the closure of several hotels, appetite for accommodation in the Greek capital is soaring. Especially in the downtown precinct connecting Syntagma Square to Omonia and Athens’ famous archeological sites. Enter a fresh new breed of inner-city b...
Read moreWorld-famous concert pianist Alain Lefèvre invites Insider’s Amanda Dardanis into his new Athenian home to discuss his latest Philhellenic album; why he moved to Greece - and a few of his pet hates. As muses go, the epic Athens Riviera panorama which greets you the moment you enter Alain Lefèvre’s coolly-elegant penthouse in V...
Read moreAnd no, we’re not talking about visiting the Acropolis (that’s a given). We’re talking about those priceless, socio-cultural moments that define what being Greek is really all about. The Long Sunday Lunch When Greeks go out to lunch en-famille or with parea, it’s the very opposite of a rushed affair. Anything under 4 hours is j...
Read moreSifnos. The Summer of 1972. An off-radar Greek island with goat trails for roads and no ferry dock. Enter a budding young artist on a quest of self-discovery. In his book, The Greek House, Christian Brechneff presents a funny and moving narrative about his relationship to Sifnos, its unforgettable residents, and the house he bought in a h...
Read moreNational Museum of Contemporary Art director Katerina Koskina talks exclusively to Insider’s Stella Sevastopoulos about Greece’s valiant artistic community, the well-documented struggles facing EMST - and that media furore over Jan Fabre. Katerina Koskina is dedicated to the progress of contemporary art in Greece. She is also...
Read moreJohn Carr goes into bat for Salamina, that much-maligned, silent achiever of the Saronic, shaped just like a “stranded octopus”. “So, did you go anywhere interesting over the weekend?” “Yeah, Salamina.” (A shocked silence.) “Please tell me you are joking.” That’s the kind of reaction you may well expect after you adm...
Read more
