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

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.

2025 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards Winner - Best Mediterranean Food Culture Book in the World

Founded in 1995, and with participation from over 200 countries, the Gourmand Awards are the only international competition dedicated to publications on food and drinks cultures.

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.