When in Athens eat as the Ancient Athenians did.
One place that caught my eye during the web research I did for this trip was the Archaion Restaurant http://www.thematic-dining.gr/arxaion/default_uk.asp?page=&lanq=uk
It is near Mexagourgi Station, so we hit the metro again. We waited all of two minutes for a train, changed at Omonia (Ammonia, for reasons to be explained later) Station and we were there. We navigated with the map and found it at mid-day, and we found it closed, one disadvantage of travelling at the end of the season is that some places are closed.
Kate asked me, do you want to come back in evening and eat here? No, I replied. My interest was only curiosity. Now had it been open for lunch we would certainly have gone in. But I did not think this curiosity warranted a night ride to eat with a spoon. In any event we could tell from the Greek signs if it was going to be open in the evening anyway.
My curiosity was partly based on my current project on meals in common - syssitia. This project is explained on another post. A meal in common is shown below from an excellent Spanish web site on Sparta from Argentina found under History at
http://www.laeditorialvirtual.com.ar/Index.asp
I thought to get first hand experience of something of the cuisine of a syssitia. However, it would be only partly accurate, because the common meals were in Sparta not Athens, and Sparta was a more fertile land than Attica, which is why Athens turned to the sea. Spartans had it better. Even so a meal without wheat, without tomatoes, without a fork … the list goes on, had no intrinsic appeal.
Athenians went in for symposia that were altogether different, always private and often luxurious with much wine.
Hence Plato’s dialogue of that name. The text is available here http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html