Most advice about saving money on food in Greece amounts to eating worse food. Skip the restaurant, buy a pie, sit on a wall. That works, and after three days of it you will resent the country slightly, which is a poor return on a holiday.
The methods below are different. Each one lowers the bill without lowering the meal, and they stack: use four of them at once and a table for two that would have cost seventy euros costs closer to thirty. They are ordered roughly by how much they save.
1. Move dinner earlier and book it
The largest single saving available in Greek restaurants is the one nobody thinks of as a saving: eating at seven instead of nine. Restaurants here fill late, which means the early sitting is close to empty and worth almost nothing to them — and a table worth nothing is a table they will discount.
This is what off-peak booking platforms sell. On Filotimo you reserve a table before the restaurant's peak hours and the kitchen takes fifty per cent off the food; you pay for drinks as usual and a service fee that starts at six euros for one person. Nothing about the meal changes except the hour and the number at the bottom.
Read nextOff-peak dining in Greece: the cheapest hours to eat
2. Eat your main meal at lunch
The magireuta — the trays of stewed beans, stuffed vegetables, baked lamb and greens that Greek kitchens cook in the morning — are a lunch phenomenon. They are cheaper than anything grilled to order, they are usually the best cooking in the building, and by nine in the evening they are finished.
Making lunch the substantial meal and dinner the small one is the single most Greek thing on this list, and it can halve a daily food budget on its own.
3. Order small plates and share
Four people ordering four main courses will always pay more than four people ordering seven small plates, and will eat less well doing it. The economics of a Greek menu reward sharing because the cheap items are the good ones.
A useful default for four: two vegetable dishes, one plate of fried things, one cheese, a salad, and one grill or fish to split. Add bread. That table eats better than four separate mains and costs perhaps two thirds as much.
- Two or three small plates per person is generous, not stingy.
- Order in two rounds — most tables over-order in the first thirty seconds and leave food.
- One shared salad for the table is normal; one each is a tourist habit.
4. Walk away from the view
Sea views, ruins and harbour fronts are priced into the food. Two or three streets inland the same dish routinely costs thirty to fifty per cent less, and the room is full of locals rather than day trippers.
This is not a small effect at the margins; it is often the difference between a fifty euro dinner and a thirty euro one. If you want the view, have your drink there and eat somewhere else.
5. Drink what the region drinks
Wine is where an otherwise sensible Greek bill goes wrong. House wine — hima, sold by the half or full kilo — is a fraction of the price of a bottle and is frequently perfectly good, because it comes from a producer the owner actually knows.
The same applies to spirits and beer: the local label is cheaper than the imported one and is what the next table is drinking. Bottled water is another quiet cost; ask for a jug where tap water is drinkable, which is most of the mainland.
6. Ignore anyone standing outside a restaurant
A restaurant paying someone to stand in the street and persuade you in is a restaurant whose margins depend on people who will not come back. Prices there are set for a single visit.
The corollary is a genuinely reliable filter: the places worth eating in are usually the ones that are not trying to get your attention. Menus in five languages with photographs are the same signal.
7. Use a membership only if the maths works
Discount memberships pay for themselves or they do not, and the calculation is simple: divide the annual cost by the per-booking fee it removes and you have the number of meals it takes to break even. Filotimo Pro, for instance, removes the per-booking service fee entirely and adds peak-hour access, which is worth it if you eat out regularly and is not if you are here for a long weekend.
Run that division before subscribing to anything. If you eat out twice a year, the free tier is the correct answer.
Read nextComparing restaurant discount apps: what to look at
8. Let the kitchen decide
Asking what is good today, and then ordering it, is not politeness — it is how you end up with the fish that came in this morning rather than the one that has been in the freezer since Tuesday. It also tends to steer you toward the cheaper end of the menu, because that is where the day's cooking actually is.
In a family taverna the honest answer to that question is given surprisingly often, and it is worth more than any review.
9. Count the extras before they arrive
Bread and cover charges are legal in Greece and are usually declared on the menu at around one euro a head. That is not a scam, but it does mean a table of six has paid six euros before anything is served.
Check the menu for the cover charge, decline bread you will not eat, and look at the bill. Errors are not common but they are not rare either, and a polite question about a line you do not recognise is entirely normal behaviour here.
- Cover charge: normally stated on the menu, roughly a euro a head.
- Service is included by law; a tip is a separate, optional courtesy.
- Ask for the bill itemised if it arrives as a single number.
| Extra | Typical charge | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Bread and cover | €0.50–1.50 a head | Decline it if nobody is eating it |
| Bottled water | €1–3 a bottle | Ask for tap water where the tap is good |
| Imported spirits | €8–12 a glass | Order tsipouro, ouzo or the house wine |
| Fish sold by the kilo | €45–90 a kilo | Ask the weight and the price before it is cooked |
| Card minimum or surcharge | Rare, but real | Ask before you sit if you are paying by card |
None of these nine things asks you to eat worse. They ask you to eat earlier, share more, walk further from the view and read the menu properly. Do four of them at once and the saving stops being a matter of pennies.
How this guide is kept honest
Written in Athens by the team behind Filotimo, from the menus, prices and bookings we see across our partner restaurants. Prices move with the season and the street, so every figure here is a working range rather than a quote.