Snack Grill Express for unforgettable gyros and unique stuffed bifteki
The best food I’ve eaten – whether it’s souvlakia, desserts, pites, seafood, pizza or biscuits – all seems to have an aroma that lights up your senses and activates the same part of your brain as the incense in church and the smells time-capsuled in boxes of old photos and memorabilia. You feel like you hallucinate and get sucked back in time for a second, before coming back to reality.
Not only is this the only gyros I’ve eaten that has done that to me, but this whole shop is frozen in time and is a long-standing example of exactly what good food and Greek food is really about. The kind of thing that you’d expect to encounter in a village or the mountains, but in Greece’s second largest city.
“Many businessmen asked me over the years to open a shop in the centre [of Thessaloniki] and throughout Greece… I didn’t want to pass on the details of our work to anyone only for them to disappear with that knowledge. That’s how we stayed here, only with this shop, and we are happy.”
Above are the words of Panagiotis, whose family runs Express, when speaking to M. Hulot of Lifo in 2023.
His grandfather first opened an ouzeri (bar/taverna) on this site in 1926, and in 1980 he and his wife Athina added the 2 items that the place is best known for today:
The mesmerising, aromatic gyros. Prepared in store daily and cooked using charcoal.
Something you won’t find anywhere else on earth. A beef patty (bifteki) parcel stuffed with gyros, gouda, roquefort and mushrooms.
The first thing you’ll notice if you visit is just how busy the place is. Full of locals arriving to collect their orders, others queuing, and the remainder asking for the “hamburger”. This isn’t a place for tourists or avant-garde culinary endeavour. It’s a model for what street food - and all good food for that matter - should be about: Family. Community. Human interaction. Consistency. Longevity. Dependability. Balance.
And food that is prepared in store and made using real ingredients. “We make the gyros and mince meat ourselves. We don’t count on the butchers, because many times they have brought us bad quality ingredients… We are closed Sat-Sun because we can’t just work, we have to have some free time too. I’ve built a house by the sea and spend most of my time there, in my garden.”
📍 Malakopis 7, Kato Toumpa Thessalonikis 544 53, Greece