It's the season of fresh garlic! Garlic at its best. This basic ingredient of Greek cuisine can be found fresh at the markets encountered on our Athens walks, and now is the best time to snag a stalk.

This row of coffee beans, roasted and then grinded, is enough to wake up an entire city. One might stumble upon such a scene on our Culinary Secrets of Downtown Athens tour.

The first and most vivid impression one has of Piraeus is its port: bustling, ugly and uninviting. Just a place you have to endure in order to get to your destination, usually a beautifully serene Greek island. Piraeus, however, is definitely an exciting place for anyone looking for a culinary adventure, as it is a melting pot of cultures with many interesting places hidden in the backstreets, away from tourists. The whole area next to Hadjikyriakeion for example, a girls’ orphanage built in the 19th century, is well known to locals for its humble, yet high-quality tavernas, serving fresh fish and simple meze all year round.

The working-class area of Brahami has never been Athens’ hottest gastronomic destination. It is a mostly residential neighborhood, halfway between the city center and the exotic beach-loving southern suburbs. Like most of the city’s suburbs, in the not-so-distant past, this area was once made up mostly of fields. Now formally named Agios Dimitrios (St. Dimitrios, after St. Dimitrios’s church), it has a vibrant local market. It’s also home to Remoutsiko, a family-owned, family-friendly taverna focusing on meat. Housed in an old converted barn, the restaurant has been around for some 30-plus years.

A wide variety of reasonably priced fresh fish, shellfish, crabs and kalamari for the customers to choose at the Athens Municipal Market, a stop on our Culinary Secrets of Downtown Athens walk.

On our Plaka walk, this four-legged friend was begging for food, so we couldn't help but share some of our sheep's milk yogurt. We are expecting more animal followers on our Athens walks from here on out.

In the era of such food crazes as the “cronut,” it seems that every city has its own classic fried-dough treat that is now being reimagined, and in Athens, loukoumades (think of them as the Greek predecessor of doughnut holes) seem to be getting a major overhaul as of late. Why revamp such a perfect childhood classic, you might ask? Loukoumades are considered to be one of the oldest recorded pastries (and desserts, for that matter) in the world – in fact, the ancient Greek poet Callimachus and philosopher Aristotle wrote about these bite-sized, fluffy fried-dough balls. The triumphant winners of the first Olympic games in ancient Greece were the ceremonious recipients of xarisioi plakoi (χαρίσιοι πλάκοι), or honey gift-cakes.

Locals shop for fresh citrus in the winter at the Keramikos market in Central Athens. Our Culinary Secrets of Downtown Athens explores areas like this.

Loukomades, a Greek predecessor to the donut that was awarded to winners during the Ancient Olympic games! Victory is sweet, and can be found on our walk through Downtown Athens.

Evi Papadopoulou is no stranger to the culinary arts. A well-regarded food journalist who has written articles on pastries and desserts in the top Greek gastronomy publications, she is also a classically trained chef. She studied at the culinary school of renowned Italian pastry chef Iginio Massari and followed that up with specialized training in making artisanal gelato at Francesco Palmieri’s prestigious laboratory in Puglia, Italy. In July of 2014, Papadopoulou opened Le Greche, a gelato parlor tucked away on Mitropoleos Street, right off Syntagma Square. The parlor itself is straight out of an Alphonse Mucha painting and has an Art Nouveau feel, with its airy, muted color palette. Since it opened, the shop has accumulated quite a cult following – and for good reason.

There is an ancient saying in Greek, Theros, Trygos, Polemos, meaning “wheat harvest, wine harvest and war”: All three are situations that need immediate attention and cannot be postponed until later. Hopefully there will be no war, but having completed the wheat harvest, we are nearing the finish line of the wine harvest.

There’s been a revolution taking place in Greece over the last couple of decades, and it doesn’t have much to do with the political and economic turbulence troubling the country – it’s all about wine. Wine in Greece, of course, has ancient origins: The first traces of it were discovered on the island of Crete and date back to 2500 BCE, during the Minoan civilization, and the oldest winepress in the world was found in the ruins of Vathypetro, near Heraklio.

With the banks closed for almost two weeks and Greece’s position in the eurozone the subject of heated debate and endless negotiations for the past several months, we wondered how some of our favorite restaurants were coping. Greeks had voted NO to austerity the previous Sunday (July 5), but did this mean they were spending their spare cash on staples for harder times and going out only to take part in demonstrations or stand in ATM queues?

It’s October and mushroom season in many parts of Europe, but if you were hoping for anything like Genoa’s Porcini Festival in Athens, you’re out of luck. But don’t despair: ‘shrooms, wild and cultivated, can be found; it just takes a little sleuthing.

With its rich, profound history – its roots lie in epics and at the foundation of modern civilization, after all – the Greek language is ripe for and with metaphor, particularly of the food-related variety. Folk sayings and proverbs have a prominent place in colloquial language and everyday life, and they are at turns humorous, instructive and ironic. And sometimes they are all three at once.