Grande Dame opened its doors on the ground floor of a historic neoclassical building on Nikis Street, which was once an inn and which in more recent years housed the Old Athens tavern. Its interior was gutted, renovated and acquired a different style. The old tile under your feet is more than a century old, the tables are spread across three rooms with various lamps, some vintage, some more modern, paintings of ladies – call them ladies – and vases of fresh flowers. The fact that the space moves between old and new, mixing elements of both, reflects the style and style of the food.
– GRANDE DAME ATHENIAN TAVERN –
GREEK CUISINE
Yiannis Solakis sees Greek cuisine with his own eyes, returning to familiar dishes of old urban restaurants and home tables and utilizing techniques and ingredients from some other traditions that we learned and assimilated along the way. He speaks of a “modern Greek cuisine that looks back”. Already from the velvet taramo salad with ouzo, which comes sprinkled with almond fillets and the fragrant, if slightly too firm hummus, with crunchy chickpeas (nice touch) and pomegranate, I see what he means. It is even more reflected in his original Athenian dish, with lettuce and chopped potato, peas, carrot, in an unsaturated mayonnaise.



















