Café Avissinia: Flea Market Find

Sooner or later almost everyone in Athens, tourist or local, heads for the flea market, the city’s oldest bazaar, below Monastiraki Square. Although it’s busiest on Sundays, all week long you can rummage through the antiques – furniture, bric-a-brac, mirrors, paintings, vintage toys, statuettes, vases, silverware – spread out in colorful disorder in front of the small shops that line all four sides of Avissinia Square. There are still treasures to be found for those with patience, and it’s one corner of Athens that has kept its funky character more or less intact over the decades.

One treasure that requires neither a keen eye or a connoisseur’s expertise is Café Avissinia, the square’s only establishment where the antiques are not for sale. A restaurant/watering hole, where you can stop for a coffee or a full course meal, the Café is more than just a place to grab a bite. With its old-fashioned rush-seated chairs and marble-topped tables, pink floral wallpaper, tiled floors and stained glass or painted windows, it feels part ancestral home, part elegant 19th-century Viennese coffee house. Portraits and landscapes fill the walls, lining the stairs to the second dining room and roof terrace; period sconces and chandeliers shed a gentle light; and porcelain platters, pitchers and vases on high shelves give diners plenty to contemplate while awaiting their order.

That the café blends in perfectly with the square was no accident. Its owner-founder, Ketty Koufonikola, chose the location because it reflected her own interest in art and antiques. And because it seemed like a good place where she could combine them with her other passions, cooking and entertaining.

As her son and current manager, Nikolas, told us, when she opened the café in 1986, the upstairs still operated as an auction house, and the all-male proprietors of the antiques shops did not take kindly to this female interloper. But Ketty was no ordinary woman. A native of Thessaloniki who’d spent many years in London, “she had a balance between her aristocratic side and her free-spirited tomboy side,” said 40-something Nikolas. “If I had to describe my mother, I’d say she’s the Greek Martha Stewart, without being such a perfectionist. She’s a great hostess but she’s also down to earth, a warm personality, and she can handle any situation. In those days, she was like Bouboulina [the legendary sea captain in the Greek War of Independence], that rare creature, a woman who was the boss in a man’s world.

To read more, please visit: Culinary Backstreets
Article written by Diana Farr Louis