Telis

Telis has been on Evripidou — the spice street that runs west from Athinas Square — since 1955, and serves one dish: pork chops with chips and a tomato-cucumber salad. There is a menu on the wall but the room only cooks the pork chops; ordering anything else gets a polite raised eyebrow. The dining room is fluorescent-lit, tiled to head height, twenty-four seats, busy at lunch with the wholesale-market workers from the surrounding blocks. The chops come from the same butcher the family has used for sixty years. For the audience reading the city's working-Athens canon, Telis is the second necessary stop after Diporto — the single-dish working-class room that refused to add anything and made the absence its argument.