The Metamorphosis of Greek Cuisine

An Ethnography of Deli Foods, Restaurant Smells and Foodways of Crisis

Nafsika Papacharalampous

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032341811
• eBook ISBN: 9781000897340
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 'Best Mediterranean Food Culture Book in the World' Award at the 2025 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards

This book is an ethnography of the metamorphosis of rural foods and traditional dishes and of the making of cuisine and identity in contemporary Athens.

In the wake of the financial crisis in Athens in the mid-2015s, forgotten rural foods of the past are transformed into luxurious artisanal foods, while traditional dishes appear reinvented in fine-dining restaurants, after decades of darkness. How, and why is this all happening in a city of poverty, hardship and economic crisis? Through sensory descriptions and thick ethnographic material, it follows the Athenian affluent middle class in upscale delis and goes inside fine-dining restaurant kitchens, discussing the complex combination of cuisine, tradition, memory and identity, revealing the cultural logic and social aspects of cuisine. It demonstrates how cuisine emerges from very different, often contradictory social spaces, not only as an intellectual and aesthetic endeavour of chefs or as a revival of foods and foodways that link the country and the city, but also as interlinked with embodied memories and embedded in social relations and commensality.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students in Anthropology and Food Studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Cuisine in Athens
• Part 2 Cuisine in delis
• Part 3 Cuisine in restaurants
• Part 4 The metamorphosis of Greek cuisine
• Index