Around ten years ago, when we created FNL Vegetarian, challenging gastronomic restaurants in Athens to serve a high-end vegetarian menu for a limited period, we touched one of the most awkward and sensitive nerves in the city’s restaurant scene: the experience of a vegetarian guest in a very good restaurant. Athens already had all the necessary assets. Excellent raw materials, technically accomplished chefs with creative minds, and a cuisine that had grown up with wild greens, pulses, vegetable dishes cooked in olive oil, pies, cheeses, eggs, mushrooms, herbs and olive oil. In other words, its culinary memory already contained the raw material needed to develop such a narrative.
A decade later, the most meaningful progress is once again coming from fine dining. In the meantime, the international scene has moved a long way forward. Vegetarian and plant-based cuisine has shifted from the realm of dietary choice to the heart of the contemporary gastronomic conversation, alongside sustainability, seasonality, a new ethics of raw materials and the need to reconsider what deliciousness means beyond the obvious presence of protein. In Athens, vegetarian diners can now find quite a few interesting dishes in good gastrotavernas, bistros and contemporary Greek restaurants. But what happens at the level of a complete high-end experience?
In a restaurant of this kind, someone who is vegetarian or vegan is asking for something far more complex than a good alternative. They are asking for a proper gastronomic journey. They want to sit at the same table as everyone else, with the same expectation of pleasure, and it is precisely here that one can see which restaurants have considered vegetarian cooking as a gastronomic language, and which merely handle it as a special request.
Aleria occupies a central place in this conversation, because the cooking of Gikas Xenakis knows how to give the ingredients of the Greek land depth, emotion and a personal creative voice. Garden & Nature, the restaurant’s vegetarian tasting menu, carries a clearly Greek memory. Tomato with goat’s cheese, cherry and rose; chickpea stew with courgette and Florina pepper; cauliflower with hazelnut, pear and Olympus graviera; artichoke with topinambur and fennel; wild mushroom with parsnip, black truffle and roots; and ekmek with bitter almond, cinnamon and pear all show how rich Greek tradition can become, even within vegetarian cooking, when filtered through a kitchen with technique and personality.
Petros Dimas’ proposal at Makris takes the subject in a more narrative, strictly vegan direction. The menu is called Physis Vegan and has a logic of its own, beginning with the farm and building an experience around the growth, memory and evolution of raw materials. “Dad`s tomato”, served as a cappuccino illusion, the “Bouquet from Dad’s Farm - 10..20..30 Herbs ”, the sourdough bread, and the risotto of beetroot textures with bergamot and pine needles are all dishes that stand alongside the gastronomic highlights served by the kitchen.
Patio’s strength begins at the farm. Panagiotis Giakalis has at his disposal a rare privilege for Athenian fine dining: top-class vegetables, fruit, herbs and eggs from Margi Farm, around half an hour from Vouliagmeni. The mushroom pithivier, available in either vegetarian or vegan form, encloses the earthy intensity of mushrooms, while the stuffed raviolo with aubergine moves on a more Mediterranean frequency, bringing the familiar sweetness and smoky dimension of aubergine into a refined, carefully worked and thoroughly gastronomic composition.
The case of Sense becomes particularly interesting through its vegetarian menu, “Roots & Reflections”, in which Alexandros Charalambopoulos returns to the flavours that shaped the restaurant’s journey and rereads them through Greek nature, tradition and his own contemporary perspective. Here, vegetarian cooking has a clear Greek core, recognisable deliciousness and gastronomic care. The tomato fritter with mint and PDO feta from Epirus, the briam with aubergine terrine, xinomyzithra and potato crisp, and the kagianas with confit egg yolk, smoked tomato paste, Volaki Andros cheese and tomato tea all point to a cuisine rooted in familiar flavours, which it then carries into a more complex, carefully worked form.
Delta represents the most research-driven and avant-garde side of Athenian haute cuisine. The multi-award-winning restaurant can serve a 12-stage vegetarian or vegan menu based on local produce from small-scale producers, fermentations, preservation techniques and the free-spirited creativity of chef-artist Giorgos Papazacharias. In its vegetarian reading, this philosophy can be expressed through compositions of real depth and through fermentations that deliver umami in places where, in other contexts, the kitchen might seek intensity elsewhere.