Diporto

Diporto, 'two doors', has been in the basement at Theatrou and Sokratous since 1887. There is no sign, no menu, no website; the two doors of the name lead down to a wine-cellar dining room with eight tables, six barrels of retsina, a kitchen that cooks three dishes a day and writes them on the wall in chalk. Run by the Dimitris family for the third generation. The clientele at lunch is the Central Market porters, the wholesale fishmongers, the office workers from the surrounding blocks who know that the chickpea soup is the structural reason to come. For the Istanbul cosmopolitan reading Athens through tables rather than monuments, Diporto is the structural anchor, the room that refused to update for a hundred and thirty-eight years and made that refusal the point.