Kolonos
Taverna ton Filon.
A neighbourhood taverna on Argous in Kolonos, evenings only.
A 1958 grill taverna in Kolonos, abandoned for a decade, brought back by chef Yiannis Mousios and sommelier Giorgos Kontorizos. They kept the room as it was — the same chairs, the same two paintings on the wall — and rebuilt the kitchen around seasonal Greek dishes and a wine list devoted entirely to the Greek vineyard. Evenings only, Tuesday through Sunday.
The taverna's first licence was issued in 1958. It ran for two generations as a neighbourhood grill, known locally for its paidakia, until it quietly closed sometime in the 2000s and sat empty for the better part of a decade — the sign still hanging, half-hidden by jasmine that kept growing long after anyone was tending it.
Chef Yiannis Mousios and sommelier Giorgos Kontorizos found it in the summer of 2022. Mousios had cooked at Seychelles in Metaxourgeio; Kontorizos had run the floor at Spondi and VeriTable. Neither wanted to open in the centre. They wanted something small, restrained, theirs. They cleared a decade of dust by hand, kept the bones of the room, and reopened in November 2023 under the original name.
Kolonos comes here. So should you.
Little was rebuilt. The wooden chairs are the ones that were already there. Two large paintings — one rural, one pastoral — still hang on the walls, exactly where they always hung. What changed is smaller: white tablecloths, new light fixtures, a few plants placed with some restraint. The result reads less like a renovation than a room that was simply allowed to wake back up.
The kitchen moves with the seasons and the market, which means the one-page menu changes often — stewed goat, steamed crayfish, giant beans, veal tail with handmade manestra, wild greens with charcoal-roasted potato and goat cheese. Mousios builds from inherited recipes and finishes them with a kitchen-trained hand: a recent dish paired raw fillets of sea bream with persimmon and a citrus sauce that had no business working as well as it did.
Kontorizos built the wine list around the Greek vineyard specifically — the bottles you'd hope to find in a serious taverna and rarely do, plus a long by-the-glass selection, retsina, spirits, and dessert wines. Nothing imported for the sake of it. The list argues, politely, that Greece doesn't need to look elsewhere.
Kolonos is dense and residential, with few reasons for outsiders to come. Taverna ton Filon has become the reason. Word moved through Instagram and then through the city itself, and a room that was built to seat a neighbourhood now regularly turns away people who didn't book.
2022
Year
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Price
