Greek Street Food

Greek street food is food sold in streets, markets and small shops for eating straight away. Food tours with a host take place in Athens, Thessaloniki, Crete and other parts of Greece. Topics run from souvlaki, gyros and pita to koulouri, bougatsa, filo, piroski, kokoretsi, Thessaloniki and pagoto kaimaki. More on the subject appears in Greek food, Greece food tours and Greek seafood. Each trip sits within the broader range ofGreece tours.

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What is Greek street food?

Greek street food is food that a hawker or stallholder sells in a street or public place. A hawker is a trader who carries goods about to sell. Markets, fairs and parks count too. In Greece, fast food won wide popularity during the 1970s.

A portable booth, a food cart or a food truck serves as the stall. Buyers are meant to eat the food straight away. Street foods count as both finger food and fast food. Finger food is food eaten by hand. Fast food is food that is ready quickly, with little wait between ordering and eating.

A 2007 study counted 2.5 billion people eating street food each day. In ancient Greece, small fried fish already counted as Greek street food. Frying means cooking in hot oil or fat. The philosopher Theophrastus, however, thought poorly of the custom of eating in the street. His field, philosophy, deals with reasoning about life and knowledge.

Fast-food outlets in Greece went on to serve souvlaki, gyros, tiropita and spanakopita. In Greek street food, souvlaki means meat grilled in small pieces on a skewer. Gyros is meat roasted on an upright spit, then sliced thin. Tiropita is a pie filled with cheese. Spanakopita is a pie filled with spinach, a leafy green vegetable.

• Minoans: The ancient Minoan civilisation already had kebabs, meat cooked in pieces, in the 17th century BC.
• Homer: Homer’s Odyssey, an ancient Greek epic poem, describes strips of meat threaded on skewers for broiling.
• Athens: In Classical Greece, cooks prepared kebabs at taverna sites, or eating houses, in ancient Athens.

Kebabs were also staples of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine means of the eastern Roman Empire, whose people spoke Greek. Images show Byzantine Greeks preparing kebabs. Today, souvlaki and gyros carry meat on skewers and spits into Greek street food.

How does souvlaki fit into Greek street food?

Greek street food took souvlaki from vendors of Boeotia. They began selling the skewers widely as fast food in the 1960s. The name is a diminutive formed from souvla, the Medieval Greek word for skewer. A diminutive names a small version of something.

In 1850, the French traveller Gustave Flaubert watched Greeks grill meat threaded on a bamboo stick. He saw this in the Boeotian countryside, in southern Central Greece. In Macedonia and other parts of northern Greece, souvlaki is the common word for this Greek street food. Macedonia here means the large northern region of Greece, around Thessaloniki.

In Greek street food, souvlaki-pita means grilled meat folded into a lightly grilled pita. Sliced tomatoes, onions and tzatziki, a yogurt and cucumber sauce, go inside with it. Fried potatoes come on the side, though cooks increasingly tuck them inside. In places, chicken versions swap tzatziki and onions for yellow mustard sauce and lettuce.

Corfu, an island in the Ionian Sea, adds a special tomato sauce to souvlaki. Locals call it red sauce. Russian salad and melitzanosalata also turn up as garnishes and sauces. A garnish is a small extra added to a dish. Melitzanosalata is a dip made from aubergine, the purple vegetable. Russian salad mixes diced vegetables with mayonnaise.

• Nichoria: At Nichoria, stands that held skewers over a fire stayed in use into the Early Iron Age.
• Aristophanes: The comic poet Aristophanes mentioned small skewers used for roasting thrushes, a kind of songbird.
• Shish kebab: Souvlaki resembles Turkish shish kebab, but Greek cooks make it with pork as a rule.

English speakers sometimes call souvlaki skewers kebabs. In Greece, however, that is not the proper name for them. Greek street food keeps its own word for meat on a stick. A skewer is a slim stick or rod that pierces chunks of food.

Which story lies behind gyros in Greek street food?

Greek street food owes gyros to a method developed in Bursa, an Ottoman city, in the 19th century. Cooks there stacked meat on an upright spit and sliced it off as it cooked. A spit is a metal bar on which meat turns beside the heat.

In Greece, gyros comes rolled in an oiled, lightly grilled pita. Tomato slices, chopped onion and fried potatoes go in with the meat. Pita is a soft, round flatbread. In the 1950s, Greek street food of this kind came rolled in pita. Plates of it arrived with French fries, salads and tzatziki, a yogurt sauce.

Hand-made gyros mixes fat trimmings in among the stacked slices of meat. The stack forms an upside-down cone. It stands on a tall upright rotisserie, a turning spit. As the cone cooks, juices from the upper part run down and baste the lower part. To baste means to wet meat with its own juices.

When the outside is done, the cook slices it off vertically in thin, crisp shavings. Roasting speed changes with the strength of the heat and its distance from the meat. The speed of the turning spit matters too. Greek street food cooks use these controls to match how fast customers order.

• Athens: Gyros wraps had become a well-liked fast food in Athens, Chicago and New York City by 1970.
• Name: In Greece, critics attacked the older name as Turkish and put forward the word gyros instead.
• Relatives: Gyros, Arab shawarma, Canadian donair and Mexican al pastor all derive from Turkish doner kebab.

In Canada, the Halifax donair grew out of Greek gyros in the 1970s. Its creator, Peter Gamoulakos, came from Greece. In English, the final s of gyros is read as a plural, which produced the singular gyro. Greek street food keeps the full word, gyros.

What role does pita bread play in Greek street food?

Greek street food uses pita, a round flatbread raised with yeast and baked from wheat flour. In Greece, this flatbread serves almost only as a wrap for souvlaki or gyros. Tzatziki, tomatoes, onions and chips then round off the filling.

Another name for pita is simply Greek bread. In Greek, the word pita points by default to the thicker Greek kind, which has no pocket. The thinner style is called araviki pita, which means Arabic pastry. That thin bread is the khubz style, named after the Arabic word for bread.

Pita bakes at high heat, so the water inside the dough becomes steam. The steam puffs the bread and forms a pocket. Bakers traditionally serve pita fresh from the oven. In Greek Macedonia, souvlaki pita is fried on a griddle, not toasted on a grill. Athens follows the grill method for this Greek street food.

Beyond Greek street food, the Greek word pita also means pastry. The word takes in cakes and pies like spanakopita, a spinach pie, and karydopita, a walnut cake. Traditional Greek bread comes as risen loaves, like the round karveli and the oblong frantzola. British English uses pita for pocket breads, such as the Greek pita that wraps souvlaki.

• English: The earliest English use of the word pita on record dates from 1936.
• Cyprus: Cypriot pita is rounder and fluffier, and bakers cook it on a cast-iron skillet.
• Turkey: Turkish borrowed the word as pide, and Balkan languages also use pita.

Pita can scoop up dips such as hummus, a purée of chickpeas. It can also wrap kebabs, gyros or falafel in the way a sandwich holds a filling. Falafel are fried balls of ground chickpeas. Of those fillings, gyros belongs to Greek street food.

Where does koulouri sit in the story of Greek street food?

Greek street food includes koulouri, a circular bread. The same bread ring appears across the former Ottoman Empire, where it is called simit. It turns up above all in Armenia, Turkey and the Balkans. That last region covers south-east Europe, Greece included.

Centuries before modern Greek street food, Constantine VII Porphyrogennitos described a bread called kollikion. He wrote in the 9th century. He was a Byzantine emperor. In his account, it was a little bread shaped like a ring, sold in Constantinople. Constantinople was the Byzantine capital, today’s Istanbul. In Latin, the ring bread is known as arculata.

The earliest Ottoman records call the bread simid-i halka, meaning round simit. Istanbul has produced simit since 1525. Early 19th-century oil paintings by Jean Brindesi show simit sellers on Istanbul’s streets. So the bread was street food there, as koulouri is in Greek street food today. The artist Warwick Goble drew the same sellers in 1906.

Simit is eaten plain, or at breakfast with tea, fruit preserves, cheese or ayran. Ayran is a salty yogurt drink. Fruit preserves are fruit cooked slowly with sugar. Turkish speakers sometimes call the bread susam kebabı, meaning sesame kebab. Turkish street sellers call simit fresh, since bakers make it all through the day.

• Trolley: Turkish street vendors sell simit from a trolley or from a tray carried on the head.
• Izmir: In Izmir, simit goes by the name gevrek, a word meaning crisp.
• Ankara: Ankara bakes smaller and crisper simit than other cities do.

In Thessaloniki, koulouri is a popular snack. The ring bread is thus part of Greek street food in the north. Thessaloniki is the main city of Greek Macedonia, in northern Greece. A snack is a small amount of food eaten between meals.

Which towns give bougatsa its place in Greek street food?

Greek street food knows bougatsa best as bougatsa krema, or bougatsa cream. Its filling is semolina custard, and people eat it as a sweet. Semolina is coarse flour ground from hard wheat. Custard is a thick, sweet mix of milk and eggs.

Bougatsa tastes different in different regions of Greece. Greek street food buyers in Veria get bougatsa cream that is very sweet and packed with cream. Thessaloniki makes its bougatsa cream crunchy and less sweet. Athens sides with Veria, serving a sweet version full of cream. Veria is a town in Greek Macedonia.

Chania, a city on Crete, gives Greek street food a cheese bougatsa. The filling is local mizithra, a soft white cheese that is not sweet. Cooks then sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on top. Bougatsa cream, by contrast, is served hot in small pieces. A light dusting of icing sugar, cinnamon or both goes on top.

Serres, a town of Greek Macedonia, holds a record: the largest puff pastry, made on 1 June 2008. The pastry weighed 182.2 kg and stretched 20 metres in length. More than 40 bakers made it. Puff pastry is dough built from thin layers that rise and flake in the oven.

• Fillings: Other bougatsa versions use chocolate cream, apple, potato purée or spinach.
• Mix: One more version combines spinach with feta cheese inside the pastry.
• Burek: Bougatsa is a Greek variation of burek, a wide family of filled pastries.

Today bougatsa enjoys its greatest popularity in Thessaloniki. The city sits within Central Macedonia, a region of the Greek north. For Greek street food, that makes Thessaloniki the leading bougatsa town. A region is a large administrative area of Greece.

What is filo, the dough behind Greek street food pies?

Greek street food pies rest on filo, a very thin pastry dough made without yeast. Its name echoes fyllo, the Greek word that means a leaf. Bakers use it for baked goods such as bougatsa, a Greek breakfast pastry.

Filo dishes take shape in layers. Cooks lay down sheet after sheet, brushing each with oil or butter, and then bake the stack. Spinach pie works this way, with spinach, egg and cheese between the sheets. That pie is eaten across the Balkans, Greece and Turkey, and it belongs to Greek street food too.

Certain food writers credit the Greeks with inventing filo, the base of Greek street food pies. They point to a sweet of bread and walnuts in the Odyssey, Homer’s poem of around 800 BC. The scholar Thomas Day Seymour takes a different view. In his view, Homer’s Greeks did not know walnuts, almonds or pistachios as foods.

The food writer Susanna Hoffmann notes pies among the ancient Greeks. Philoxenos’ poem Banquet, from the fifth century BC, describes a cheesecake of honey and milk. Ancient sources, however, gave no details of how such pies were made. Later, the Ottomans made paper-thin dough across their empire, including the Balkans.

• First print: In print, the word filo first turns up in an American newspaper in 1946.
• Immigrants: From the 1960s, Greek immigrants spread hand-made filo through parts of the United States.
• Machine: A practical filo machine arrived in 1971, and frozen filo then reached American supermarkets.

Food writer Aglaia Kremezi argues that the ancient placenta cake was, in her view, quite unlike modern pies. Placenta here is the name of an ancient layered cake. Greek street food pies such as bougatsa and tiropita now rely on crunchy, paper-thin filo.

How did piroski join Greek street food in northern Greece?

Greek street food gained piroski from Pontic Greeks, who brought these filled buns with them. Piroski is popular in parts of Greece, above all in the north. Pontic Greeks migrated from the Black Sea after the Lausanne Conference, a peace conference.

Large Greek cities sell piroski too, as a type of fast food. Specialty piroski shops sold these buns and nothing else. Specialty here means devoted to one product. Piroski was eaten more widely in the past. Shops that sell only piroski can still be found in Greece today. They keep this corner of Greek street food alive.

In Greek street food, piroskia come fried. Piroskia is the plural of piroski. Fried means cooked in hot oil. Fillings include feta cheese, kasseri cheese, minced meat or mashed potato. A mix of feta and ham is another choice. Feta is a white, salty cheese, and kasseri is a firmer yellow cheese. Cooks serve piroski hot.

Pirozhki is the Russian name for buns raised with yeast and shaped like a boat. Cooks bake or fry them, and fillings vary widely. The word pirozhki means little pies and comes from pirog, Russian for pie. The root is pir, meaning feast or party. Greek street food piroski belongs to this wider family.

• Street food: Pirozhki rank as a popular street food and a comfort food.
• Shape: Pirozhki are boat-shaped or, more rarely, crescent-shaped, with the filling sealed inside.
• Size: Pirozhki are hand-sized, so a single bun fits in one hand.

Pirozhki are common fast food on the streets of Central Asian countries, such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Russians introduced them there. Families also make them at home, both Russian and non-Russian. Central Asia is the inland region east of the Caspian Sea.

What goes into kokoretsi, the spit-roast of Greek street food?

Greek street food turns offal into kokoretsi. Cooks wash the innards and cut them into pieces. Lemon, olive oil, oregano, salt and pepper give a light seasoning. Garlic joins them at times. Offal means the inner organs of an animal.

Greek street food cooks turn the intestine inside out and wash it with care. Next comes a rub of salt and a soak in vinegar, or in lemon juice and water. The finished roll is compact, about 16 to 24 inches long. While it roasts, cooks can baste it with lemon juice and olive oil.

In a second style, the cook mixes and chops the innards nonstop with two spatulas. Once done, the dish stays warm on the griddle until a buyer orders a serving. A griddle is a flat, heated metal plate. In Greece, this piece of Greek street food is served all year round.

The Byzantines cleaned intestines by turning them inside out with a small stick. They then wrapped them in braids or around other entrails on a skewer. Two of their names for the dish survive in Greek dialects, such as that of Corfu. There the words still mean wrapped intestines.

• Albanian: The Greek dictionary maker Babiniotis traces the word kokoretsi to the Albanian kukurec.
• 1920: The Turkish word kokoreç first appears in a 1920 short story by Ömer Seyfettin.
• Athenian: Seyfettin first met the dish as the specialty of an Athenian working in an Istanbul restaurant.

Kokoretsi can come on a piece of flatbread. After a mad cow disease outbreak in the late 1990s, a ban on eating offal was considered. Mad cow disease is a brain illness of cattle. The idea was dropped, so kokoretsi stayed on Greek street food menus.

Why does Thessaloniki stand out in Greek street food?

Greek street food in Thessaloniki carries an Eastern flavour. Ottoman rule there lasted about a century longer than in southern Greece. The city kept much of its Eastern character, culinary tastes included. Ottoman rule means rule by the Turkish-led empire based in Istanbul.

Spices play an important role in Thessaloniki’s cooking. That is less true of the southern regions of Greece. The Ladadika borough is a busy centre for the city’s cuisine. A borough is a district of a city. Tavernas there serve traditional meze and similar dishes. Meze means small plates of food shared at the table.

Bougatsa, a breakfast pastry, is very popular throughout Thessaloniki. Greek street food names also shift here: in Thessaloniki, souvlaki means the dish that Athens calls kalamaki. Regional cooking in Greek Macedonia lists souvla, souvlaki and kontosouvli among its dishes. Souvla and kontosouvli are larger cuts roasted on a spit.

Beyond Greek street food, the city’s notable sweets include Trigona Panoramatos, Roxakia, Kourkoubinia and Armenonville. Trigona means triangles in Greek. Thessalonians also tend to choose freddo espresso over frappé. Frappé is a foamy iced coffee, and freddo espresso is iced espresso. The freddo comes with ice and a straw in a tall glass.

• Sweet spices: Greek recipes, above all in the north, pair meat with sweet spices like cinnamon, allspice and cloves.
• Coffee break: For Thessalonians, coffee marks a quick pause from work during the day.
• Meeting point: Coffee also gives friends, families and couples a chance to meet and relax.

Bougatsa has spread from the city to other parts of Greece and to the Balkans. That spread carries a Thessaloniki favourite into wider Greek street food. The Balkans form the south-eastern corner of Europe. Thessaloniki is the largest city of northern Greece.

Where does pagoto kaimaki fit among Greek street food sweets?

Greek street food sweets include pagoto kaimaki, an ice cream made with mastic resin. The resin gives it an almost chewy texture. Pagoto is the Greek word for ice cream. Modern ice cream reached Greece early in the 20th century.

Mastic is a resin, a gummy sap that seeps from a tree. Ice treats in Greece go back much further than pagoto, to ancient times. In the 5th century BC, people in the markets of Athens ate snow blended with honey and fruit. That market snack counts as early Greek street food.

The ancient physician Hippocrates encouraged his patients to eat ice. He believed ice livened the body’s juices and raised well-being. Alexander the Great favoured a treat of snow ice sweetened with honey and nectar. Modern Greek ice cream drew heavily on Turkish dondurma. Dondurma is the Turkish word for ice cream.

Salepi also goes into Greek ice cream as a thickener. It helps the ice cream resist melting. Salepi is a flour made from orchid roots. Other Greek flavours use olive oil and figs, or kataifi and cocoa. Kataifi is shredded filo dough that looks like very thin pasta. Cocoa is the powder of roasted cacao beans.

• Mavrodaphne: Among Greek street food sweets, pagoto Mavrodaphne takes its flavour from a Greek dessert wine.
• Spoon sweets: Spoon sweets, fruit kept in syrup, go on top of Greek-style ice cream.
• North: A distinct form of dondurma is eaten in northern Greece, under the name kaimaki.

The name kaimaki comes from kaymak, which entered Greek from the Turkic languages. Kaymak is a creamy dairy food similar to clotted cream. Clotted cream is thick cream skimmed from heated milk. In Greek street food, the same name marks a mastic ice cream.

What do travellers ask about Greek street food, and what are the answers?

A Greek street food dish can travel far from home. Street foods can start as regional dishes, yet a large share spreads beyond its home region. Greek sandwiches in Paris and Germany, boureki pastries and Cypriot souvlaki all show that movement.

How does souvla differ from the souvlaki of Greek street food?

Souvla, a dish from Cyprus, roasts big pieces of meat on one long skewer above charcoal. Its cuts are much bigger than those of souvlaki. They also cook slowly, set further back from the hot coals. In Greece, the closest match is kontosouvli, big chunks of pork cut off the bone.

Did Greek street food reach France and Germany?

Yes. In West Germany, gyros made with pork was a fast food before doner kebab became popular. In Paris, Greek restaurateurs sold a sandwich grec, French for Greek sandwich. Later names such as kebab replaced it, yet the old term still turns up in Paris today.

What are boureki in Greek street food?

Boureki belong to the burek family, a group of filled pastries. In Greek, pastries of this family also go by the name pita, meaning pie. Under Venetian rule, Corfu called boureki burriche and filled them with meat and leafy greens. The Pontic Greek piroski takes its name from the same root.

How does Cyprus serve souvlaki, a staple of Greek street food?

In Cyprus, souvlaki goes into a large pita with a pocket-style opening. Lamb or pork is the traditional meat, and cooks cut it into slightly larger chunks. The usual salad inside is tomato, cucumber and shredded white cabbage. A pocket-style opening lets the filling slide inside the bread.

Featured photo: Nikolai Karaneschev, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.