Roll up your sleeves and cook Greek classics the way they started: from the garden. In a bright kitchen in Koukaki, a few minutes' walk from the Acropolis, you spend a morning making nine dishes entirely from scratch — all of them plant-based, all built on olive oil, herbs, and whatever the season is giving. When everything is ready, it becomes your lunch.

Your host introduces you to modern Greek cooking, then hands you a knife. Working in small teams, each group takes the lead on two or three dishes. You bake fresh pita until it puffs in the oven, and prepare three dips to go with it: smoky melitzanosalata, cool tzatziki, and a spicy tirokafteri. You blister Macedonia's famous Florina peppers until the skin lifts, then fill them with seasoned grains and herbs. You build a mushroom gyros that answers the question every visitor to Athens asks, roast a rustic briam of seasonal vegetables, and toss a bright politiki salad of cabbage, carrot and lemon. To finish, there's rizogalo — creamy Greek rice pudding with cinnamon.

No experience is needed and nothing is demonstrated at you. Our hosts guide you through every step, from holding the knife to plating the last dish. When it's all ready, everything goes on one table and you eat together — a shared lunch with the people you cooked beside, from wherever in the world they came.

You leave with the recipes, whatever is left over, and the quiet confidence that you can do this again at home.