ON THE NEARLY 190-mile train journey from Athens to Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, my partner Barry and I share a compartment with a middle-aged Athenian couple. Soon, they are plying us with homemade spanakopita (spinach and feta pie). After an hour, our new friends point out the window: Mount Parnassus, “home of the muses.” Not long before we reach Thessaloniki, they gesture once more: Mount Olympus—“home of the gods”—Greece’s mightiest peak, looms as we swing past.
And then the mythological abode of Olympian deities appears again on our stroll through the city in the afternoon. Mount Olympus is now a snow-streaked vision emerging from the haze across the Thermaic Gulf as Barry and I sit at one of the cafés along the paralia, the city’s three-mile pedestrian promenade, where lovers stroll arm in arm, joggers exercise, and grandmas gossip vehemently. Behind us, Aristotelous Square unfolds in its vastness, surrounded by curving meringue-colored building facades. This is Thessaloniki’s famous piazza, designed in 1918 by French urban planner Ernest Hébrard after a fire ravaged the historic Greek-Roman-Byzantine-Ottoman core of the city long known as Salonica.
Later that evening, when the capricious clouds cover Mount Olympus again—or was it just a mirage?—George Palisidis, a chef, culinary educator, and tonight’s food guide, uncorks a bottle of sparkling white assyrtiko wine at an outdoor table of the bar Blé Vin. Around us, at tables made of repurposed tree stumps, twentysomethings are smoking, laughing, and snapping photos of charcuterie boards. “ cured in olive oil. Aged ripened in wine lees”—Palisidis annotates our cheeses before ducking inside the bar for a platter of bright red meat. “Buffalo,” he declares, “from Lake Kerkini, a Central Macedonian reservoir.” He’s interrupted by the approach of an athletic woman in a pink dress. A general murmur goes up. Enter Voula Patoulidou, homegrown celebrity and Greek sporting legend for her gold medal in the 100-meter hurdles at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
