Greek Food and Wine Guide
Greek Desserts
Most Greek tavernas do not have a wide selection of desserts. They usually offer to customers that they like, some sort of free sweet or fruit after the meal. In summer this will be watermelon (karpouzi) and cantaloupe (pepponi). In winter many tavernas have Halva which is an interesting sweet made from sugar, farina, cinnamon and almonds.
Most Greeks, if they have a hankering for sweets will leave the taverna and go to a pastry shop or ice cream shop or combination of both. These are very popular and quite common and are called Zacharo-Plastea which I guess translates to sugar-design. Zacharo being sugar and Plastea being the root of our English word for plasticity. If you are named Zachary you better be a sweet person.
Anyway, once you get to a zacharo-plasteo, if its a good one, you will have a wide variety of sweets to choose from such as French or Viennese pastries and more traditional Greek sweets like Kataefi and Baklava. This photo, on the left, is from one of my favorite sweet shops which happens to be a chain and called Dodoni (hedonism). I recommend this chain to you. Some
other well know sweet shops are Asimakopoulos, Leonidas, Luxor and Flocafe.
Dodini's claim to fame is ice cream but the fudge brownie cant be beat this side of 7th avenue. One thing they don't have is congo bars and I hope they rectify that deficiency soon. In the case below, Yes your eyes are not deceiving you, that is a cheese cake in the top left corner. Cheese cake is rather good in Greece.. so try some!
You'll notice a difference when you get around to tasting Greek ice cream. Its much smoother and almost like Italian gelato which is also sold in some sweet shops. Notice the tray with the chocolate dipped cones in the photo above right. They come with or without the chocolate and in three sizes. You can also order ice cream to go and in small cups with one, two, three and even more scoops! They also have chocolate syrup but don't have jimmies or oreo cookies or even orie cookie ice cream. The oreo cookie hasn't bridged the cultural gap yet.
Incidentally, you cant buy ice cream in most pastry shops but its easy enough to find at a kiosk and Algida, an Italian brand, is my favorite, Greek ones are good too! SKANDAL is worth buying!
In addition to hard to transport cakes and mousses you can purchase all kinds of chocolate and hard candy that will keep till you get it home and off the plane. Its a good gift idea!