City life Athens

For a taste of Greece, there's nowhere like the capital. Athens' food scene is being transformed with age-old producers running cutting-edge restaurants and hip bakeries adding fresh flavours to historic neighbourhoods

- By Laura Holt

Tasos Mantis greets me in his family’s organic garden, where plots of Jerusalem artichokes, sweet-smelling basil and brick-red bergamot slope some 2,500ft down towards the Corinthian Sea. This is the summer home of his parents: 72-year-old father, Babis, a former plumber, and mother, Maria, a welcoming Greek matriarch, whose tanned face breaks into a soft smile as I arrive.

We’re around an hour’s drive from Athens, in Alepochori village, but the scene feels a world away. Swallows swoop overhead. Chickens wallow in the dust. Gravel crunches underfoot as we browse raised beds, but overall the prevailing sound is of silence.

Tasos, scruffy in his earth-stained Airtex trainers, stands with secateurs ready to clip off a selection of the garden’s 32 varieties of edible herbs and flowers for me to taste. His understated look belies his glamorous reputation — the chef is one of Greece’s best, with a constellation of Michelin stars under his belt from stints at Belgium’s gilded Hof Van Cleve, Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck and Hytra restaurant in Athens.

I’m here to find out about the produce behind Soil, Tasos’s debut restaurant which he opened in a century-old house in November 2021 with co-owner Alex Mouridis, in the up-and-coming Pangrati neighbourhood in central Athens. Soil stands at the forefront of the city’s evolving food scene, as an exciting, self-styled proponent of ‘earthy gastronomy’. Like many of the new dining spots in Athens, its foundations are rooted in time-honoured agrarian traditions. Menus borrow from ancient Greek recipes handed down over generations, reimagined afresh for a new wave of well-dressed Athenian diners.