Nikos Bakoulis moved to Athens in 2013, a year before The Clumsies opened. He came as the Greek World Class winner of 2011, already with a clear idea of what a serious bar in this city should look like and a scepticism about whether the city was ready for it. The Clumsies answered that question.
“We believe that it’s the doers, more than the thinkers, that move forward.”
The bar opened in 2014 on Praxitelous 30 with Vasilis Kyritsis, the 2012 Greek World Class winner, and three investors who backed a concept that had never existed in Athens before: a bar built around a lab, with techniques brought from bars around the world and modified into something specifically Greek. Bakoulis and Kyritsis had been travelling together every two months for research before the opening and have continued doing so since. Fifteen years of that rhythm. The discipline behind The Clumsies’ consistency on the World’s 50 Best Bars list — in every year since 2015, No. 2 in 2019 — is in part the product of that travel.
His working ingredients are declared without hesitation: tomato, olive oil, carob. Native Greek flavours translated into cocktails that carry the structure of a recipe the way a food dish does. Localization, he says, is the only honest approach: taste, habit, and raw materials all specific to where you are. The Greek salad in a glass is difficult precisely because it demands respect for the material and understanding of how to carry a memory in a single drink.
In 2019, Bakoulis produced Otto’s Athens Vermouth — a project that took almost two years and was, by his own account, the hardest thing he had done. The concept was a Greek vermouth, which is less obscure than it sounds: Italy introduced labels in Greek letters to the Greek market between 1955 and 1960, and Greeks drank vermouth before the habit disappeared. Otto’s was built to be drunk alone, with ice or soda, its profile shaped by rose, oregano, and thyme, Mediterranean without masking its own identity.
In 2022, with Kyritsis and Dimitris Dafopoulos of Three Cents, he opened Line in a former art gallery in Kato Petralona — the most conceptually ambitious project of his career. The bar is built around fermentation as both method and philosophy: grapeless fruit wines fermented on winery protocols with official flow charts, slow-maturation bread made with pre-fermentation techniques, beer kept in metal barrels to eliminate plastic, a network of nine Greek producers supplying fig, apple, honey, strawberry, wine, and beer. Eight tonnes of beer produced in the first four months of operation. The financial logic is stated plainly: this is a real economic contribution to the microbreweries supplying it, not just an aesthetic choice.
The name carries multiple meanings — lines in architecture, design, neurons, roots beneath the ground, the universe. The method of fermentation, anarchic by nature, became the “Method of Anarchy”: finding a recipe through continuous experimentation, then adjusting by the smallest possible degree to preserve what was found. Line won Best New International Cocktail Bar at the Spirited Awards 2023 and entered the World’s 50 Best at No. 12 in its first year. By 2025 it had reached No. 8.
Bakoulis’s measure of success is not the list position. It is the combination: homelike for Greeks and foreigners simultaneously. The drinks serious, the people behind them present, the music right, the ambiance in balance. Bars as therapy. Doers, not thinkers.