Booking a table in Athens: what helps

Most advice about booking restaurants is written from the diner's side. This is written from the other side of it, by the people who read the messages, and the honest summary is that almost every awkward evening starts with a booking that did not say enough.

None of what follows is specific to us, except where it obviously is. It applies to most restaurants in this city, and it takes about a minute to act on.

The four ways to book here, and which to use

Online is the fastest and it works at three in the morning, which is when a surprising number of people decide to organise their week. It goes to the same system the floor team is looking at, so a confirmed slot is genuinely confirmed rather than a request somebody will read later.

The phone is +30 210 777 5225, and someone answers during opening hours, which here means from eight in the morning until three the following morning. Call if your request has any complexity to it at all. A conversation solves in thirty seconds what an exchange of messages solves in a day.

Email goes to [email protected] and is the right channel for anything you want a written record of. It is read, and it is answered, but it is not instant, so do not use it for tonight.

WhatsApp exists and works well. One thing worth knowing: the line answers for more than one restaurant, so begin the message with the venue name. If you come through the link on our own site it does that for you automatically, which is the reason it is set up that way.

What to say, which is more than most people say

Give the real number of people. Not the number you hope will come and not a round number you have chosen for tidiness. A table laid for six that seats four looks like a mistake, and a table laid for four that receives six is a genuine problem in a full room, because the space beside you belongs to somebody else.

Say if somebody in the party cannot eat something, at the point of booking rather than on arrival. A kitchen given three days can build something properly. A kitchen given three minutes, mid service, can only subtract. This is the single piece of advice on this page that changes the food you get.

Say if it is an occasion. Not because anybody needs a fuss made, and you can ask for no fuss at all, but because a birthday table and an ordinary table are placed differently in a room, and the decision is made before you arrive rather than after.

Say roughly when you will actually arrive. Fifteen minutes late is normal in Athens and nobody minds. Forty five minutes late without a message is how a table gets released, because at that point the restaurant is choosing between your empty chairs and the people waiting at the door.

When you need to book and when you do not

During the day you can generally walk in. Breakfast, brunch, the long flat afternoon: the room is big and it is rarely at capacity before the evening. If you want the terrace specifically, that is worth a call even at a quiet hour, because the terrace fills on its own schedule.

For dinner, for any Friday or Saturday, and for any group at all, book. The room does fill, and the failure mode is not that you wait, it is that you eat somewhere else.

For late, the picture changes again. The venue runs until three in the morning and the kitchen does not close down into a short list the moment dinner service ends, but the last kitchen order and the last reservation slot are not the same as the closing time. Ask when you book if you are planning to arrive late, and you will be told exactly.

The point where it stops being a booking

Somewhere around a dozen people, a reservation becomes something else. The table needs a shape, the kitchen usually wants a shorter menu agreed in advance, and somebody has to decide about drinks before the evening rather than during it.

That is not a bigger booking, it is a different process, and it is handled by a different part of the team. Send it through the events page instead, where it gets a named contact and an answer inside one working day. Trying to arrange a party of twenty through a booking form is the most common way people end up disappointed, and it is entirely avoidable.

Two things no restaurant can promise

A specific table. You can ask, and a good floor team will try, and on a quiet night you will usually get it. On a full Saturday the room is a puzzle with one solution and your table is part of it. Asking is fine. Expecting is not.

And an indefinite hold. Most places will keep a table around fifteen minutes past the hour, longer if you send a message. A message is the whole trick. If the address, the hours and the map would help before you set off, the contact page has them, and the questions page covers the rest.