Glyfada

[therese]

I'm visiting Glyfada (reportedly a beachy sort of suburb just outside of Athens) for work later this month. I won't have a car, but will likely be with some others who do.

Anything in the area of note?

[Busboy]

How long will you be there? I am green with envy.

The (possibly) bad news: my recollection of Glyfada is that it's the Greek version of the less picturesque parts of the Jersey Shore, a place driven through along the Coast Road on your way to somewhere else.

The good news is that, once rush hour ends, it's a fairly cheap and quick cab ride into downtown Athens, Piraeus/Microlimano or Vouliagmeni: 15-20 minutes, 10 euros or so.

If memory serves, Vouliagmeni is where Athenians prefer to go to the beach, I cabbed by it at night and cars were parked in little nooks and crannies with campfires going and, one assumes, wine and fish consumed in large quantities.

Piraeus/Microlimano is fish taverna heaven.

Athens is, well, the birthplace of Western Thought and all.

Here's a thread I started on Athens, it may be useful and there are a couple of other Athens restaurant links embedded in it, which may be useful, as well.

In the Athens area:

Never plan to eat before 9PM unless you want to be branded totally uncool.

Never trust a cabbie, always bring a map of where you are going and, possibly, a phone #. (Cabs are dirt cheap, it the meter is actually running. Trust no driver, though)

If you are there over Saturday or Sunday, enjoy "lunch," a huge feast that starts between 2 and 3 (the stores in Athens close at 2 on Saturday) and has people dancing by 6. Piraeus/Microlimano is a great place to do this.

Never try to keep up with Greeks once they start drinking.

Never travel main roads during rush hour (8AM-7PM weekdays, 12-2 Saturday and after 5PM on Sunday) if you can help it. Hopefully your hotel will be close to wherever you work.

I believe the tram now travels to Glyfads, consider using that and a good book rather than taxis or a private car.

Try to carve out some free time. Greater Athens can be a bit dingy, but I loved it.

Have fun .

[therese]

How long will you be there? I am green with envy. 

←

I'm there for a week, actually staying in the building where the meeting's to be held, so that will be very convenient indeed. My first full day on the ground (jet lag recovery day) will be Monday, and it does look like the light rail/tram goes to Glyfada, so a day in Athens proper will be feasible. Then it's three pretty grueling days of work and work dinners, followed a couple of slightly less grueling days (and then off to Italy for week's holiday).

My previous experience with taxi drivers in Thessaloniki this time last year is congruent with your advice re their colleagues in Athens.

No dining before 9:00 pm, definitely (fortunately one can fritter away hours and hours in very nice bars/cafes), but I'll have to make a point of staying away from U.S. and northern European colleagues who get testy if they're not fed by 7:00.

I'll check out your previous thread for some possibilities.

[therese]

Back from my trip to Glyfada.

Glyfada is small seaside town with a marina that houses all sorts of small yacht-type craft. There's a small town center with a church and shops (it's actually known for its shopping---lots of upmarket designers like Armani and Hugo Boss and so forth, but not interesting to me since I've got all that at home in Atlanta) and restaurants. Hotels and condos and posh vacation homes behind high gates surround the town center. Upmarket night clubs front the beach.

There's a nice tram that runs from the town center all the way into Athens. It's cheap, clean, and very modern (including air conditioning). It's pretty much the only thing in Glyfada that meets all of these criteria.

The tramline runs parellel to the coast road, which features 8 lanes of traffic (four in each direction) and very little in the way of effective traffic control. Public transit buses travel in excess of 130 km/hr, and of course they're in the slow lane to the far right. This wouldn't really be an issue were it not for the fact that there's very little in the way of sidewalks along much of this road. There was sidewalk between the conference center (where I was lodged) and the town center, but to the other side of the conference center there was either none (dirt and broken glass only) or it was entirely blocked by cars. So we came to call the coast road the "highway of death".

My first evening in Glyfada I was in charge of picking the restaurant for myself and three colleagues. I chose a Lebanese restaurant that I'd passed earlier in the day, and we had a lovely meal. If you're visiting Glyfada and want to know more PM me and I can (possibly) direct you to it.

The next day I dragged a different group of colleagues with me to Athens. We stopped for lunch at a taverna in the Plaka, on the small road that's to the immediate east of the Parthenon.

This is the view from the restaurant:

This is the restaurant and one of the staff (presumably family):

These tables are located outside the garden. We ate inside the garden, which featured a very pretty pomegranate tree. My pictures inside the wall all include colleagues, so I won't include them. The service was friendly and the food decent standard issue Greek, as good as I expect to find in the U.S.

[therese]

That evening I joined the meeting faculty (about 30 of us) for dinner at a fish house on the waterfront in Glyfada. I've no idea of the name, and it was a bit grimy. Greek starters (taramosalata, etc.) which I followed with fried squid. A German colleague and I decided that we'd like to split a small serving of fish, so I ordered the small fish. As it turns out small fish meant a large serving of lots of very small fried fish, eyeballs and bones and everything. Fortunately I don't mind very small fried fish with eyeballs and bones and everything, and neither did my German colleague.

The next day featured breakfast and lunch at the conference center. Grim, very grim indeed. For breakfast each day I ate yogurt with either honey or cherry preserves and coffee. For lunch I ate Greek salad, skipping various fried savory bits and some truly repulsive-looking non-Greek pastries.

Dinner that night was at George's Steak House. More Greek starters, Greek salad, mixed grill (enough meat to feed my family for a week), and fruit to finish. All of it good, the fruit absolutely astoundingly great. Sweetest watermelon I can recall eating.

Breakfast and lunch the next day still unappealing. I was starting to lose weight.

Dinner that night wass catered by a hotel about 1 km from the conference, Hotel Phoenix. An easy walk if there'd been sidewalks, but of course there was no sidewalk, so harrowing. In the end not nearly so harrowing as the food provided by the very drear Hotel Phoenix: dessicated gray lamb chops, gray steamed broccoli, sticky pasta salad, dessicated gray frozen fish portions. I took some tomatoes and cucumbers and figured I'd eat something later. All around me people (predominantly Europeans) were consuming this food. Some people were actually returning to the buffet line. Apparently these people are extremely polite, because this food was, without question, the worst food I've ever been served, and I'm including elementary school cafeteria meals in that category.

Breakfast the next day looked pretty wonderful compared to the previous night's dinner. For lunch (oh dear, those nasty pastries again) I revolted, dragging a Danish colleague off to Glyfada town center to look for edible food. We found it at a taverna just across the street from George's steaks. We'd paused to see if they looked open, and were instantly approached by a waiter who invited us in to see the kitchen. We chose tomato and cucumber salads and moussaka, followed by fruit. The best Greek food of my visit.

On the way back from the hotel I purchase a kg (well, actually more like 1.5 kg once he'd finished tossing a few more in) of fresh figs from an old guy selling them from his car. Excellent.

Dinner that night was another hotel dinner (yes, another walk along the highway of death), this time at a fancier place with a much posher, actually edible buffet. Not as good as I'd expect for a similar dinner in the U.S., but edible.

Breakfast next day yogurt, which I supplement with fresh figs. Lunch is just figs.

Dinner that night was a dance at the conference center, which meant no stroll along the highway of death but also possibly a dinner even worse than that offered by the Hotel Phoenix, but it was actually edible. Not great, but edible.

I toured Athens the last day of the meeting (more in later post), and returned to Gyfada to change clothes and join the group for a bus ride back into Athens and dinner in a different taverna in the Plaka (I've got the name here somewhere if you really want to know). Greek starters, Greek salad, our choice of a couple of meats, and some very nice Greek sweets. We asked for more sweets and they said no. Oh well.

Sorry no pics, but then again, maybe it's a good thing.

This meeting was, by the way, planned with local representatives who were on site and could have checked things out ahead of time. And perhaps they did.

It was also reportedly a fairly expensive place to hold a meeting.

[therese]

My last afternoon in Greece I used to visit a bit more of Athens, including a visit to the central market, where I took the following pictures, in no particular order. I always make a point of asking whether it's okay to take a picture, and in Athens those queries of course started with (in Greek) "Good day. Do you speak English?" Very very friendly butchers in Greece.

Lots and lots of pigs' feet. Or maybe they weren't all pigs' feet:

[petit cochon]

Thought I would bump this thread up as I'm going to be in Glyfada working on a project for a week in mid-April. I'm going to try to make it in to Athens as much as possible (never been to Greece before!), but have no idea how late I'll be working - so any recommendations for good lunch or dinner spots in (or near) Glyfada would be much appreciated! Based on the above posts, I'm sad to hear that there are at least a couple of spots to avoid!

[therese]

I wouldn't worry too much, petit cochon, as all of the really bad food that I ate was in the context of the conference, arranged by somebody else and served at either a hotel banquet or the conference center. All of the meals that I had any say in choosing were actually pretty good, so just trust your instincts and you'll be fine.

I no longer recall the names of any of the restaurants that I did like, but Glyfada is a small place and you'll likely find some decent places. And the weather should be lovely as well.

[petit cochon]

I wouldn't worry too much, petit cochon, as all of the really bad food that I ate was in the context of the conference, arranged by somebody else and served at either a hotel banquet or the conference center. All of the meals that I had any say in choosing were actually pretty good, so just trust your instincts and you'll be fine.

I no longer recall the names of any of the restaurants that I did like, but Glyfada is a small place and you'll likely find some decent places. And the weather should be lovely as well.

←

Thanks, therese - that's good to hear! I'll report back... Definitely hoping for some sun as we've been having an especially long rainy patch here in London!

[Busboy]

And do be aware that no matter how late you work, there will be restaurants open. Depending on your own tolerance, it's easy to find dinner until well after midnight. And once you realize that they're all trying to cheat you, Athenian taxi drivers are cheap. After rush hour you can probably get to the Acropolis in 25 minutes (not that that's necessarily where you'd go to dine) for about 10 euro.