Where to eat in Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki is the city Greeks travel to for dinner. Its kitchens carry the food the refugees from Asia Minor brought in the 1920s, its markets still sell to the restaurants around them, and the city eats late enough that a table booked for nine is an early one. If you are choosing one Greek city to eat in, this is the argument for choosing this one.

Ladadika is the district built for going out. The restored warehouse quarter near the port turned the old oil merchants’ streets into the densest run of restaurants and bars in the city, and it still fills every night the city is out. It is where a first visit eats, and where the noise is - our where to stay guide is blunt about that trade.

The centre eats around its markets. The streets between Aristotelous and the Kapani and Modiano markets keep the mezedopoleia and small kitchens that the market traders themselves use, and they run later and cheaper than the square. This is the part of the city that rewards walking one street further in.

Ano Poli eats above the noise. The upper town, inside the Byzantine walls, holds the old timber houses and the tables with the whole bay below them. It is a climb or a short taxi, the pace is slower, and the best-rated kitchen in the city right now is up here rather than down on the front.

How the places below were chosen. Each card names a real, currently trading place selected by the city’s own diners, not by us: it clears a review-count floor and a rating floor on TripAdvisor or Google, with no contradiction on the other platform, and it carries the date we last checked it. We have not eaten our way around Thessaloniki, so no card describes a dish - it says what kind of place it is, where it is, and that the people who ate there rate it consistently high. Where the two platforms disagree, we say so on the card rather than quietly picking the kinder number.

What this page will not do. No prices, which move within a season. And no claim to cover the city: the waterfront and the far east of the centre are not represented yet, and their tables will come.

Start at Thessaloniki for the city, where to stay in Thessaloniki for the base decision, and Greek food and drink for how menus work.