Line

A Former Gallery, a Circular Economy, and Athens' Most Ambitious Bar

The space gives you pause before you even walk in. A former art gallery on Agathodemonos 37 in Kerameikos, Line operates in a building whose ceiling height and bare industrial bones sit somewhere between a mechanic's workshop and a contemporary exhibition space. The Mediterranean-industrial aesthetic is not decorative theatre — it reflects the bar's actual working logic. Fermentation tanks, bread-making, and fruit wine production happen on-site, making the interior as functional as it is atmospheric. In the European cocktail scene, where sustainability often functions as branding rather than operational reality, Line is the rare case where the physical environment and the programme share the same DNA.

Where Line Sits in Athens' Bar Scene

Athens has developed one of Europe's more compelling cocktail cultures over the past decade, with a cluster of bars that punch significantly above the city's international profile. Baba au Rum established the city's credibility in rum-led cocktail craft; Barro Negro built a reputation on agave spirits; and The Bar in Front of the Bar brought a more conceptual edge to the scene. Line sits above all of them on the international rankings and operates in a different register: its framework is not spirit-led but production-led, organised around what the bar makes rather than what it pours.

The lineage matters here. Line was created by Dimitris Dafopoulos alongside Vasilis Kyritsis and Nikos Bakoulis, the team whose earlier project The Clumsies has been a fixture in the World's 50 Best Bars rankings for years. That track record established Athens as a credible address on the global bar circuit. Line is a different proposition — more focused, more constrained by its own rules, and more explicitly structured around a single environmental argument.

The Circular Economy as a Drinks Programme

The core idea at Line is a closed loop. The bar ferments its own fruit wines, beers, and sourdough breads in-house, and the waste generated from that production feeds back into the cocktail list. This is not a minor operational detail , it defines the entire structure of what the bar offers and how it thinks about ingredients. In a global bar environment where zero-waste has become shorthand for garnish composting, Line's model runs considerably deeper: production waste is not diverted but reintegrated, completing the loop rather than simply reducing the output at its end.

Broader trends in high-end cocktail culture point to exactly this kind of systems thinking. Bars ranked at the upper end of the World's 50 Best increasingly signal their seriousness through what happens before a drink reaches the glass , fermentation, distillation, foraging, or in Line's case, a full in-house production chain. The ranking reflects this: Line entered the World's 50 Best Bars at #12 in 2023, moved to #6 in 2024, and holds a #120 position in the Top 500 Bars 2025 list. The trajectory over those years maps directly onto growing industry recognition of production-first bar programmes.

The Why-ins: Fruit Wines at the Centre

Line's fruit wines, branded as Why-ins, are not a side offering , they occupy the conceptual and flavour centre of the drinks list. Made in collaboration with Greek winemaker Thanos Georgilas, they divide into two categories. The Classic Why-ins follow the logic of traditional grape wine production: fruit, yeast, and time, with nothing added. The Fancy Why-ins move further into the bar team's territory, augmented with flavoured distillates, aromas, or fresh fruit additions that reflect Kyritsis and Bakoulis's background in cocktail construction.

The distinction between the two categories is worth paying attention to. The Classic range is the more restrained and, arguably, the more revealing , it shows what the team's fermentation process produces without embellishment. The Fancy Why-ins translate that base into something closer to the bar's cocktail grammar, which makes them an interesting bridge for guests arriving with cocktail expectations rather than natural wine sensibility. Neither category is positioned as wine in the conventional sense; both sit in the space between winemaking and bartending that Line deliberately occupies.

This kind of fruit wine programme has few direct comparators in the European bar scene. For context, venues like 1790 wine cave in Folegandros engage with Greek wine traditions from a different direction, and bars elsewhere in Greece such as Mitilini in Mytilene draw on local ingredient cultures , but in-house fruit wine production at this scale and with this level of ranking recognition remains uncommon.

The Cocktail List

The cocktail programme at Line does not abandon the classics tradition , it reframes it through the bar's production logic. Kyritsis and Bakoulis have built careers on flavour understanding rather than novelty for its own sake, and the cocktail list reflects that. The Delusional Margarita is the most-cited example in the bar's own documentation: reposado tequila combined with mustard, ketchup, potato water, and spices. The combination reads as provocation on paper, but the team's point is about flavour architecture rather than shock value. The potato water introduces starch and texture; the mustard and ketchup bring acidity, salt, and umami compounds that interact with the tequila in the way citrus would in a conventional Margarita. It is a technically grounded decision dressed in unconventional clothing.

This approach to classics , treating the template as a flavour brief rather than a fixed recipe , is increasingly how the world's leading cocktail bars differentiate themselves from venues that simply execute the canon well. Line sits firmly in the former camp, which explains both its rapid ranking ascent and its relevance beyond Athens.

Planning Your Visit

Line opens Wednesday through Saturday, 11:30 to 21:00, which makes it one of the earlier-closing serious bars in Europe's top tier , a schedule that reflects its daytime production rhythm as much as its evening service. The address, Agathodemonos 37 in Kerameikos, is a short ride from the city centre, accessible by taxi or metro. Kerameikos itself sits adjacent to Gazi and Psirri, two neighbourhoods with their own bar density, which makes Line a logical anchor for an afternoon or early evening that continues elsewhere. For broader Athens restaurant and bar planning, our full Athens restaurants guide maps the wider scene.

The winter months of November and December are worth noting specifically. Athens' bar scene thins out in ways that London or Paris do not, with some venues reducing hours or closing for the off-season. Line's Wednesday-to-Saturday schedule is its standard operating pattern, but visiting in the cooler months has practical advantages: the bar operates at lower volume than summer, the fermentation programme produces different flavour profiles in cooler ambient conditions, and the industrial-gallery interior, which can feel cavernous in summer, settles into something more contained and appropriate for the season.

Guests arriving from elsewhere in Greece or internationally can use Line as a reference point for the wider Athens cocktail circuit. Hope So in Kolokinthou, Galaxy Restaurant and Bar in Pagkpati, and AVENUE in Thessaloniki represent different points on the Greek bar spectrum, as does Alemagou in Mykonos for island-based options. Internationally, Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu operates in a similarly production-serious register, for those tracking this category across time zones.