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 Kolonaki and Lykavittos Hill
From the National Gardens, if you cross Vassilias Sophias street and continue up the hill from Irodou Atikou past the beautiful mansion that houses the Benaki Museum, you will be in Kolonaki Square, the rich snob section of Athens where you can sit in a cafe and listen to middle aged women complain about life as they shift from Greek to English to French.
But don't stop here. There's more fun ahead. The neighborhood is full of cafes and expensive shops, fancy restaurants and fancy people.
Walk up Anagnastopoulo at the top of the square and go right on Iraklitou, then up the steps and through the small park. If you have kids you can leave them in the playground while you take a seat at the Ouzerie in Platia Dexameni. This is one of the best spots in Athens, high enough to be breezy and cool, with excellent food. Very nice place to go for lunch and one of the few places in Athens where you can share your lunch with a rooster and some chickens.
You can get an ice cold beer here and a plate of shrimp. Excellent sausages, salads and very friendly service. One of my favorite places for ouzo too. And where else in Athens can you be entertained by a goat?
A live one anyway.
Dexameni means cistern which is what the square sits upon. It used to be the water supply for all of Athens.
There is also an outdoor movie theater that shows mostly English language films.
 I usually don't go any further but if you are adventurous keep walking uphill until you reach the tree-line and make a right. You are now in the wilds of Mount Lykavittos. You can take the Funicular Railway to the top or you can walk. Whatever you do it's worth it because at the summit is a church with a spectacular view of Athens, the Acropolis, the mountains surrounding it.
 You can see the ships in Piraeus, the Aegean sea, and on a clear day the islands beyond. It's worth being here for sunset and there just happens to be a cafe-ouzerie up there too. On the back side of the mountain is an outdoor amphitheater. Read the back page of the Athens News to find out if anyone of interest is playing. It's one of the finest places to see a concert and you never know who will be performing up there. Anyone from Leonard Cohen to Peter Gabriel. I saw James Brown there one summer!
In Edmund Keeley's excellent book Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey 1937-47 he describes Kolonaki:
 One neighborhood that almost every Athenian knows to a degree is Kolonaki, or little column, named for the column once standing alone on the edge of town but now in a busy square close to the city center. Kolonaki used to be regarded as one of the most ritzy and conservative parts of Athens to live in, until too much traffic and polluted air began to tarnish its upper-class image, though it always had a bohemian fringe around the slope of Lykavittos, where writers and artists, both foreign and domestic could find fairly cheap, congenial homes in the few two and three story houses left over from the early days when the streets were unpaved. The square that used to provide open-air tea and coffee for the elite in a paved figure-of-eight island known affectionately as "the Kolo Bidet" (the Ass Bidet) has now been cleared away to make room for the young who cruise in on motorcycles to eat pizza at the new mall or hang out over a drink to see who else may show up for a revved-up move into some serious night life elsewhere.
 And very recently some Athenians on the rise who chose to live in the distant suburbs where the air is cleaner and the parking easy have begun to come back to Kolonaki because they miss the sidewalk cafes and restaurants, however upgraded, where the talk about politics and films and trips to the islands still has some wit in it, and where the boutiques that have taken over the ground floor apartments on street after street are as classy as any in Europe.
From Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey 1937-47 by Edmund Keeley.
Click on the book cover or title, if you want to buy the book from Amazon.com
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