Vasilis Kyritsis was born in Piraeus, the port city attached to Athens’ southern flank. After school he moved to the centre and enrolled to study nursing — a choice he still references when people ask what bartending has to do with care. He started working in clubs to make money during his studies, in the early years of the 2000s when Athens had almost no serious cocktail bars. What it had were clubs, dive bars, and frozen margaritas. He credits that environment as training rather than a detour: when the only thing you can offer is your presence and good mood, you learn to connect before you learn to mix.
“The only thing we had in our hand was our relationship with the people. Nobody likes perfect people.”
He travelled to sharpen technique — the Drink Factory with Tony Conigliaro in London, seminars, smaller professional bars — and returned to Athens with a clearer idea of what Greek cocktail culture could be. He won the Greece Diageo World Class Competition in 2012. That same year he found himself behind the bar alongside Nikos Bakoulis, the 2011 Greek World Class winner. Two strangers, the story goes, who shared a sense of self-deprecating humour and the conviction that a bartender is judged by how they connect with people, not only by how precisely they execute a recipe.
They worked together for two years, then met three businessmen — Lefteris Georgopoulos, Thanos Tsounakas, and Giorgos Kaissaris — who believed in the concept. In 2014, at the height of the Greek financial crisis, they opened The Clumsies on Praxitelous Street in the centre of Athens: a run-down neoclassical townhouse turned into a three-storey all-day bar with rooms that change in character from morning to night. Menus readable only under UV light. A small bar on the upper floor for ten people, one bartender per guest, cigars and jazz. A high-volume floor below where three hundred people can drink and dance simultaneously. The same building, two completely different experiences, running concurrently.
The Clumsies entered the World’s 50 Best Bars list in 2015 and has remained every year since, peaking at No. 2 in 2019. For Kyritsis the measure of the bar’s success is simpler: from day one, people were visibly enjoying themselves.
In 2022, Kyritsis and Bakoulis opened Line in a former art gallery in Kato Petralona, in collaboration with Dimitris Dafopoulos of Three Cents. The concept is built around fermentation: grapeless fruit wines, zero-waste cocktails, ingredients that begin in a lab before they reach a glass. Line won Best New International Cocktail Bar at the Spirited Awards 2023 in its first year and entered the World’s 50 Best Bars at No. 12. By 2025 it had climbed to No. 8.
Kyritsis works from both bars, still on the floor. His working ingredients remain rooted in Greece: mastic, Greek fennel, local citrus, seasonal herbs. The philosophy has not changed since the clubs in Piraeus — the relationship with the person in front of you is the point, and everything else is in service of that.