Treis Laloun was high on my list of eateries for Athens. It was an all vegan restaurant a little out of the city centre, so it was a bit quieter than some of the other spots we visited. The menu was quite extensive, and it also sold pastries – we had some croissants and cheesy pasties to take away, and found them very convenient and tasty. And we visited the restaurant twice – once for dinner and once for breakfast. We’ll start with dinner.

Halloumi is not something I see very often on menus, so Dr HH and I both wanted to try this. The halloumi itself was covered in balsamic vinegar and pesto and sitting on a slice of tomato and a little fried bread. I honestly wasn’t that impressed with it – for me, neither the taste nor the texture resembled halloumi, which I haven’t had much since going vegan, so I was quite excited about rediscovering it. Dr HH was more impressed, even though he agreed it wasn’t necessarily realistic. We shared this starter and were glad we did – the two servings were very generous! We also felt the main courses could have served two, and took leftovers back to our accommodation for the next day.

I am powerless to resist vegan chicken, so I chose the chicken a la crème for my main. The chicken had a great texture, and there were some tasty bacon bits and meaty mushrooms in there as well, under a flavoursome sauce that had just a hint of sweetness but was well balanced.

Dr HH meanwhile chose the shrimp, which had a good crispy coating and retained a bit of bite underneath all that sauce. The sauce was creamy and very dilly, with a nice amount of fennel. It was all well cooked.

You could choose your accompaniment for each main from three options: sweet potato puree, rice, or fries. We both requested fries which you can see are not fries at all. These round chips are really not for me, I’m afraid.

There was quite an extensive breakfast menu, including a variety of different pancakes, so we returned one morning and both ordered the Bueno pancakes which you can probably deduce from the photo were a bit much. There were three quite thin pancakes with a lot of decadent sweetness thrown on top and in between: chocolate cream, nougat cream, wafers, etc. I quite enjoyed it (but obviously could not finish it), but Dr HH found it just too much and thought it was crying our for a bit of fruit to cut through the richness.

Our evening visit was after an afternoon trip to the temple of Zeus, which you can see was quite heavily scaffolded. Typical, eh? Still, you could see a couple of the pillars standing upright, and I loved seeing the toppled one on the ground there – it looks like it’s been sliced up into equal servings!