Cafe Avissinia

Cafe Avissinia occupies a first-floor corner position above the Monastiraki flea market, at the junction where the Sunday antiques market sprawls down Kynetou and Ifaistou streets. The restaurant has decorated itself in keeping with its surroundings: mismatched antique furniture, walls dense with old mirrors, enamel signs, and found objects, gramophones and clocks at every surface. The effect is somewhere between a theatrical set and a genuine jumble, and it works entirely. The kitchen serves traditional Greek home cooking — the kind of food labelled mageiritsa, meaning oven-cooked dishes produced in large vessels and served out across the day. Slow-cooked lamb stew with orzo, revithada chickpea stew, gemista stuffed peppers and tomatoes baked in olive oil, and a rotating cast of seasonal braised dishes make up the core menu. Everything is prepared fresh each morning and finishes when it runs out, which reinforces the market-taverna rhythm of early-to-midday eating. The Sunday morning visit to Avissinia — coinciding with the surrounding flea market at its most active — has become one of the canonical Athenian weekend experiences. Visitors browse the antiques, then climb the stairs to a table, order a carafe of house wine and whatever is left on the kitchen counter, and watch the market below from the open windows. The atmosphere is genuinely jovial and unforced in a part of Athens where tourist traps are common.