George Calombaris goes back to Athens every year, and the list of people he needs to see never gets shorter. There's Stelios Parliaros, the pastry chef Greeks have called a wizard since 1979, whose desserts fly business class on Aegean Airlines. There's Vasilis Kyritsis and Nikos Bakoulis, who spent a decade building The Clumsies into one of the most awarded bars on the planet, then opened a second place, Line, in an old art gallery, and watched it get named the best bar in Europe within four years. None of them show up on a map handed out at the airport.

George didn't find this city through a screen. He married into it: his wife's wedding dress was cut and sewn by one of his closest friends in Athens, finished three days before the ceremony. Earlier this year he brought a slice of that world home, running a Greek pop-up in Melbourne built entirely on what he'd just eaten and seen in Athens. This Journey is the fuller version: not a postcard idea of Greece, but George's actual address book, opened for eight days.