‘You can’t leave until you drink this.” It was still morning but I was already being offered tsipouro, the Greek version of grappa, by a group of moustached men I’d only just met. But it wasn’t what it sounds like; they were all old enough to be my grandfather. In the northern city of Thessaloniki, the Greek concept of philoxenia (showing kindness to strangers) is taken very seriously; within minutes they had magicked a chair from within the packed traditional kafeneion café so I could perch beside them. So I couldn’t refuse and, despite my stomach’s protestations, accepted the glass.
I wasn’t here to drink, though, but rather to eat. Thessaloniki is often overlooked in favour of Athens for city breaks (even among Greeks like me), but I’ve long believed it trumps the capital when it comes to its culinary offering. And I’ve just been proved right — the Byzantine city has been named Greece’s capital of gastronomy by Unesco, thanks to its rich and diverse heritage. So, in honour of this, I’d set out to discover the traditional restaurants that tell the city’s story over a weekend.
The best way to get the lay of the land on a city break, I’ve found, is to set off on foot as soon as you arrive, and that’s how I found central Kapani market and my new friends. I was reminded of a Turkish bazaar on the Bosphorus with its cacophony of spice sellers. In fact Thessaloniki does feel a lot closer to Istanbul than Athens, set on the Aegean with cargo ships toing and froing. It has been an important trading port for thousands of years — Byzantine (its city walls date back to AD390), then Ottoman, before it was Hellenised in the early 20th century.
“Many Greeks don’t know that Thessaloniki isn’t classically Greek,” Kyrios Dimitrios told me, the pensioner twirling his thick moustache as he spoke. He and his group of friends had already finished off a bottle of tsipouro by the time I’d arrived, and we all clinked glasses as he gave me an impromptu history lesson on the city. “We Greeks were once in the minority here,” he said, explaining how a century ago Muslims, Christians, Sephardic Jews, Armenians and Italians all called Thessaloniki home.
When they finally waved me off, they told me to go direct to Bougatsa Bantis. Apparently “to taste Thessaloniki you must try bougatsa”. Just past the crumbling Byzantine city walls, a small bakery has been churning out Thessaloniki’s most beloved sweet treat for half a century. The Greeks’ answer to the croissant (though it’s technically a pie), bougatsa is a crispy, crunchy pastry envelope that’s usually filled with vanilla-infused cream and dangerously moreish. It is the ultimate Greek breakfast food — though, as the third-generation bougatsa master Philippos Bantis later told me, it originated outside of Greece.
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“My family is from Cappadocia, what is now Turkey,” Bantis said, flinging pillowy dough above his head and stretching it rhythmically into a billowing sheet of ultra-fine filo, thin as tracing paper. The art of opening filo, he said, goes back to Anatolia, and the skill arrived in Greece with the migrants who fled in the population exchange of 1922, when ethnic Greeks living in what is now Turkey were forced to leave the newly formed nation and create a new life for themselves.
Back then many families made bougatsa because it was a cheap and filling snack (made up only of flour and water) that could keep labourers going all day. “Really, the best bougatsa is the one with no filling and just a sprinkling of cinnamon and icing sugar,” Bantis told me. So I had no choice but to try both versions: with and without cream. Without was a revelation. It was like a croissant, only better — much bigger, with a crispy outer layer and buttery insides. I learnt that, much to my disappointment, there are only a handful of others in Greece who still make homemade bougatsa like Bantis.
Not that there’s any shortage of pies in Thessaloniki. I made it my mission to eat trigona pastries from Trigona Elenidi on every day of my trip — triangles of filo covered in sticky syrup and filled with cool cream. I like to think of them as the bougatsa’s naughty younger sisters.
I became so obsessed with the pastries that I was pleased when Constantia, the octogenarian grandmother of a friend, invited me into her home the next day for a filo-rolling demonstration. Despite her age she handled the rolling pin deftly, moving it so fast across the table that her hands almost blurred.
Like Bantis, her family came to Thessaloniki from Turkey, in this case the Pontic Mountains of eastern Anatolia. The Pontics are credited for bringing pies to Greece — not the stodgy, meat-filled versions of northern Europe, but delicate, crispy filo wrapped around wild greens, pumpkin or crumbly cheese.
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“Most of our cooking is not of Greek origin; my entire village moved from Turkey to Thessaloniki. It all comes from there,” Constantia said. “Even Greek coffee is Turkish,” she added, as she poured some of the tar-thick brew from a tiny brass briki for me to enjoy with a slice of sweet pumpkin pie, crisp and fresh from the oven.
I found traces of Thessaloniki’s multicultural heritage everywhere in the city. Modiano market, built a century ago, was designed by Eli Modiano, a Sephardic Jew. After visiting Constantia, at an out-of-the-way little taverna called Agrophageio I tried spinach keftedes (traditional meatballs), made by Yiannis Katsantonis to an old Sephardic Jewish recipe. In the 19th century, the chef said, the community of Spanish Jews here in Thessaloniki far outnumbered the Greeks and newspapers were printed in Spanish. The community was almost completely wiped out after the Second World War, but you can still find traces in the Jewish museum — and in the city’s restaurants.
“These are the things we Greeks have forgotten, but our history is still written in our food,” Katsantonis said, listing where all the dishes came from as he placed them in front of me. He ticked off all the regions on his dough-covered fingers: Pontic pies; dumplings from Armenia; polenta from Italy; meatballs in tomato sauce from Anatolia. Thessaloniki’s rich heritage was served to me on a plate — and it was the best history lesson I’ve ever had.
Anastasia Miari was a guest of Zeus Is Loose hostel (room-only doubles from £56). Three nights’ B&B at the Excelsior from £408pp, including flights and transfers, departing in May (easyjet.com)
