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Today is Thursday, 22 October, and there are 70 days left until New Year's Eve. Our language school began on 12 October, and today comes Part 2, one day later than promised: the starter. Level A1, topic: ordering and staying polite. The honest interim report Under Part 1, nobody has left a homework sentence or a vote on the big question so far. We say so openly, as we promised. That is why there are no reader sentences to correct today and no result to announce. The big quest

Today is Tuesday, 20 October 2026 – 72 days until New Year’s Eve. And this is the chapter we promised you: Chapter 76 of “Table 85”, our serial story in which you decide what happens next. It was meant to arrive around 16 October and is four days late – so it carries the promised number 76, not the number of days that are left today. First things first: since Friday, 16 October, we are back – ready to welcome you and look after you, with a genuine smile and warm hospitality.

Today is Friday, 16 October 2026 – 76 days until New Year’s Eve. The break is over, and the first sentence we want to say today is an old one: Welcome to Greece. Back from today From today, 16.10.2026, we are ready to welcome you and look after you – with a genuine smile and warm hospitality. The break did what breaks do: we have recharged our batteries and we are back, just a few hours before we greet you. The rest of that story is in this morning’s article – this one is abo

Today is Friday, 16 October 2026, and our break is over. Since 4 October, twelve days in all, we were closed for our company holiday. Yesterday was the last day, and for today we have one number: 100%. The number in the corner Every phone shows it in the top corner: how full the battery is. At 9% we know at once what to do. For ourselves there is no display. That is why a phrase has caught on in recent years: the “social battery”. It describes the feeling of having sometimes

Today is October 14, and there are still 78 days until New Year's Eve – eleven weeks and one day. Our annual break ends tomorrow; from Friday, October 16, the restaurant is open again. Until then, we write postcards. The idea: a postcard that never gets mailed A postcard has too little space, and that is its whole trick: when you have little room, you have to decide what really matters. So today we ask for exactly one thing: a postcard to a street. Preferably to Arndtstraße i

Today is 13 October – 79 days until Silvester (31 December), exactly eleven weeks and two days. After the language school, the telephone experiment and the decibel archive, today gets quiet. Today is about something you can't measure: what you remember when you think of food. Two Reasons to Eat The first reason is the obvious one: we eat to stay alive. The body needs fuel, and food delivers it. The second reason only shows up afterwards: we eat to remember – without ever plan

Today is 12 October – 80 days until Silvester (New Year's Eve). After "Telephone in Four Languages" we ask the next question: what if you learned both languages right where they meet – at the table? The idea: a school without a classroom Two languages sit together at our tables: German and Greek. So we learn from each other – from very simple to quite tricky. The Mastiha Language School has five parts, and each part is a course of the evening: Meze, Starter, Main Course, Dess

Today is 12 October. 80 days until Silvester (New Year's Eve) – and after Saturday's Decibel Archive, today our Telephone game begins, but with languages. As children we all played Telephone (in German: Stille Post): one person whispers, the next whispers it on, and in the end something completely different arrives. Today we play it with translations: a sentence starts in German, travels to Greek, on to English and comes back to German. Four stations, three translations. The

Today is 10 October. 82 days until Silvester (New Year's Eve) – eleven weeks and five days. Some evenings you remember not for the food but for the sound: laughter from the next table, the clinking of glasses, music so loud you had to lean in to the other person's ear. And then there is the opposite: a silence in which you can even hear the spoon. Both can be a wonderful evening. But how loud is a really good evening – in numbers? We don't know. So today we are starting a sma

Today is October 9th. There are 83 days until New Year's Eve. And today we're running an experiment in which you supply the ingredients and an AI lays the table – or, more precisely, makes the seating plan. Who sits next to whom? Anyone who has ever planned a party knows the question. It sounds small and can decide a whole evening. That's why we're appointing a seating usher. Who is the usher? To be upfront: an AI The usher is an AI language model (Claude by Anthropic). We sa

Today is October 8th. There are 84 days until New Year's Eve – exactly twelve weeks. That is the time you have if you don't wait until the last evening to start thinking about the year ahead. And that's what today is about: resolutions. But with a twist we enjoy: you don't keep your resolution. You give it away – and get someone else's in return. Why swap at all? A resolution for the new year is usually a promise to ourselves. And we tend to be especially generous when it com

Today is 7 October. There are 85 days left until New Year's Eve – twelve weeks and one day. And because we'd rather not just count those days, we're going to tell them. Starting today, a serial story runs here: Table 85. Each chapter's number is the number of days still left until New Year's Eve. Today it's Chapter 85; the last one will be Chapter 0, on 31 December. And here's the twist: you decide what happens next. With a single letter. Important up front: the taverna, the

The plate is empty, the glasses nearly so, and then it happens: the bill lands on the table. Five people who were laughing about everything a moment ago suddenly go very quiet. One reaches for a phone, one for a wallet, one discovers something fascinating on the ceiling. Two worlds, one slip of paper One world has apps that assign every cent to a name. They work out who owes whom – fair, clean, traceable. Apps like Splitwise turned an awkward moment into a piece of software.

In Part 1 we set the table: fava, saganaki, tzatziki, olive, vine leaf, bread and chili were the first seven roles. We actually planned to write Part 2 only after our holiday closure. But a table that waits in the kitchen doesn't get any better – so the sequel comes now. Mastiha has been closed for the holidays since Sunday, October 4, and we're back for you from Friday, October 16. Taking stock: zero answers We checked under Part 1: so far there isn't a single answer. No vot

In a mezedopolio, something happens that hardly happens in any other restaurant: nobody orders “their” dish. The plates land in the middle, the forks start wandering, and after ten minutes no one remembers who ordered what. That is no accident – that is the actual recipe. So today we are not asking what is on the table, but who is sitting around it. Because every good group works like a good meze table: it needs different people who complete each other. A word with food insid

Picture a table: meze, a glass of wine, a coffee, a tavli board. And in the middle stands a basket. Not for bread, but for phones. The kafenion knew no scrolling In the traditional Greek kafenion, life happened at the table: people debated, rolled the dice at tavli, let the komboloi slide through their fingers and sipped a coffee that took its time. Whoever had a newspaper read from it aloud or argued about it. Nobody called it “digital detox”. It was simply the evening. Toda

Picture a cake. Somewhere inside it is hidden a coin. Whoever finds it in their slice has luck – for the whole year. That's how the new year begins in many Greek families: with the vasilopita. What Is a Vasilopita? The vasilopita is the New Year's cake, named after Saint Basil, whose day is celebrated on 1 January. A coin, the “flouri”, is baked into the dough. The cake is cut at the turn of the year, and the slice with the coin is considered a lucky charm. Details differ fro

On Tuesday, 29.09.2026, we turned back the clock on Arndtstraße – and you turned it back with us. Live music, 1960 prices and a form of payment that hasn't been seen at a cash register for almost 25 years. The Drachmen Fest was a success, and you made it one. So first and from the bottom of our hearts: thank you. The Drachmas Are Still Out There Almost 25 years after the end of the drachma, many of you still had some: in drawers, in old wallets, tucked between holiday photos.

Tonight from 5 pm: Drachmen Fest at our place, Arndtstraße 12. It's today – and after that, only 5 days until our summer break. Now, the bet. You have one euro in your pocket. Just one. The question isn't what you can buy with it – the question is what you would buy with it. And before you answer, one fact that complicates things: when the euro was introduced, the conversion rate for Greece was fixed at 340.75 drachmas per 1 euro. Your single euro would suddenly be a small fo

In Berlin, people walk to get somewhere: to the U-Bahn, to the corner shop, to an appointment. In Greece there is a word for the exact opposite – Volta (βόλτα). A volta is a walk whose purpose is to have no purpose. So what exactly is a volta? The word probably comes from Italian (volta – a turn), and that is exactly what a volta is: a round. You take one in the early evening, after dinner or on Sunday, along the promenade, around the village square, up the main street and ba