There is no such thing as bad food in Athens
============================================

There is no such thing as bad food in Athens is an old saying John Kiriakou reports testing, in the course of an operational routine.

He had recruited a source inside a terrorist group who was so sensitive that meeting him in Athens was unsafe. So the meetings happened on the west coast, where nobody knew the man, a three-and-a-half-hour drive each way, and that, Kiriakou notes, "with John driving 105 miles an hour."

He made a weekend of it, and the weekend was the cover. There are many vineyards out there: he would tour one, do a tasting, eat at a good restaurant, drink more wine and buy a case to take home.

The lorry stop

Outside Corinth, near the ancient city and the canal he says has always fascinated him, is a truck stop that looks like any other anywhere in the world: lorries queued for fuel, and a greasy spoon.

Kiriakou notes the Greek custom that made the visit possible: in every restaurant you are invited into the kitchen to lift the lids off the pots and see what is being cooked, stirring with a big spoon and choosing. It is considered offensive not to allow it, and the same is done in Cyprus. "I really loved it."

He expected low-quality mass-produced Greek food. What he got, he says, was as delicious as any Greek food his mother or grandmother ever made, and that is when he concluded the saying was true: "there really is no such thing as bad food here."

The claim is not that Greek food cannot be bettered. Speaking from Cyprus in 2026 he ranked the island's cheeses above the Greek ones as more sophisticated and more subtle, on the ground that Greek cheeses, feta, kasseri, kefalotyri, kefalograviera, are mostly "variations on each other", where each Cypriot cheese stands on its own.

See also

- Cover stop
- Kiriakou's Athens house
- The Greek Orthodox Church
- Kiriakou's first recruitment
