Sip & Savor
The Low Road: The Plaka Apologia
Athens · 5 stops · every stop verified in live map data · ends near a bed
Socrates delivered the first apologia downhill from here and lost. Yours will go better: cellar wine at noon, ouzo lit like stained glass, rebetiko until the marble listens. Two of these rooms are shut on Sundays, so do not open the case on one.
🥃 Walk it live on the map- 1 · The Cold Open
DiportoNo sign, no menu, no card machine. Two doors and a stair down to a cellar under the market. The 1887 everybody prints comes from an English travel piece and appears nowhere in the Greek record; what the freeholders can actually show is a lease from 1913 letting this basement as a wine shop, and describing it as one already. Retsina comes out of the barrels along the back wall into red tin jugs. There are about four dishes and you do not pick them. Cash, daytime, shut Sundays. - 2 · The Detour
KapnikareaNamed for the Byzantine church it sits beneath, and it is a room rather than a monument. Sotiris Sofos was a well known tailor with a good address book, and he opened this in 1977. His son Dimitris took it on in August 1996, the month the first stretch of Ermou was pedestrianised and the street outside changed for good. The kitchen is his mother Evangelia's, from Ikaria. Order ouzo and let it come with the music: seven till half ten most nights, laiko and rebetiko, sometimes a swing band instead.laiko and rebetiko seven till half ten most nights, sometimes a swing band instead · 🎧 they play · Rembetiko with bouzoukia at Kapnikarea ↗ - 3 · The Anchor
KlimatariaOINOMAGEIREION is still painted over the door, which is the old word for a cook shop that sells wine. The house says 1927, when a Mr Gerodimos turned a church café into one, and no register anywhere confirms it. The name has not even been continuous: it was Neo Kosmiko from 1961 and briefly Nea Agora in 1996. A working musician named Periklis took it over in the mid nineties, which is why there is a band. It burned at dawn on 23 July 2005 and was rebuilt. Barrel wine, raki and ouzo by the carafe. Never music on a Monday. - 4 · The Wildcard
BrettosThe wall of lit bottles is the photograph everyone comes for. What this is not is a distillery, whatever the sign says: a law about fifty years old stopped distilling in central Athens, so the liqueurs are made out at Koropi now and the ouzo and raki in Arta. The Vrettos family sold up around 1969 and the Papadonikolakis family have had it since the mid two thousands. Forty odd liqueurs, ouzo to quadruple distilled, tsipouro, rakomelo. Through the same door and down the stairs is Damigou, a taverna from 1864, which really is the oldest in Athens. - 5 · The Last Call
GalaxyWalk into the arcade at Stadiou 10, because a phone will put you out on the pavement at the wrong door by about twenty five metres. Yannis and Jimmy Alabanos, two brothers from Lamia, opened Galaxy in 1972 at number five and moved five doors along around 1990. Yannis was still working the room in 2025 and his son Kostas is on the bar. Whisky, gin, a dry martini people cross town for, and a house rule about music: it is not supposed to bother you. Second oldest bar in the city, not the oldest. Shut Sundays.
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