Monastiraki
The Clumsies.
Day Bar
Opened in 2014 by Vasilis Kyritsis and Nikos Bakoulis in a neoclassical townhouse on Praxitelous Street. An all-day bar that runs from morning coffee to a 300-capacity late-night floor, with a ten-person jazz bar upstairs and menus readable only under UV light. On the World’s 50 Best Bars list every year since 2015 — the longest consecutive run of any Athens bar. No. 2 in the world in 2019.
In 2012, two strangers found themselves behind the same bar. Vasilis Kyritsis had just won the Greece Diageo World Class Competition. Nikos Bakoulis had won it the year before. They had a shared sensibility — self-deprecating, people-first, allergic to the kind of precision that forgets there’s a person on the other side of the glass — and they spent two years working out whether a bar built on that sensibility could exist in Athens at scale.
It opened in 2014 on Praxitelous 30, at the height of the Greek financial crisis, in a run-down neoclassical townhouse that had no obvious future as anything. Three businessmen — Lefteris Georgopoulos, Thanos Tsounakas, and Giorgos Kaissaris — believed in the concept enough to back it. The building was transformed floor by floor into something Athens had not seen: an all-day bar that changed character with the hours, from morning coffee to afternoon cocktails to a late-night room that could hold three hundred people without losing the quality that made it worth entering in the first place.
It was a risk starting out. But from day one, we could see people enjoying their time.
The design is part of the argument. Menus are printed to be read only under UV light — not a gimmick but a decision about how to slow the experience down. On the upper floor, a small bar seats ten people, one bartender to each guest, jazz and cigars, a completely different register from the high-volume floor below. Two bars in one building, running simultaneously, each coherent on its own terms.
The Clumsies entered the World’s 50 Best Bars list in 2015 and has remained on it every year since, the longest consecutive run of any Athens bar. It peaked at No. 2 in 2019. Kyritsis and Bakoulis are both still on the floor most nights, their visible presence being part of the discipline rather than a performance for guests.
Greek ingredients run through the cocktail list in ways that are specific rather than decorative — mastic, Greek fennel, local citrus, seasonal herbs sourced from the same producers season after season. The food programme, from a Michelin-starred chef, runs at lunch. The bar runs from ten in the morning to two at night. There is no other bar in Athens with this range, and no other bar in Athens with this record.
