Aniseed: A Love Letter to Thessaloniki

Ask most people to name a great food city in Europe and you'll hear the usual answers. Paris. Rome. Zurich. Barcelona. Thessaloniki rarely makes the list, and that is one of the great injustices of the food world. Greece's second city — perched on the northern shore of the Thermaic Gulf, with its Byzantine walls and Ottoman-era covered markets — has a food culture of extraordinary depth and complexity. It has been quietly feeding people extraordinarily well for over two thousand years. It just hasn't felt the need to tell everyone about it.

A City Shaped by Many Kitchens

Thessaloniki's food is the product of layer upon layer of history. Byzantine Christianity, the Ottoman Empire, a large and deeply influential Sephardic Jewish community — each left its mark on the city's cooking in ways that are still visible, still tasted, still celebrated today. The result is a cuisine unlike anything else in Greece: richer, spicier, more complex, full of techniques and ingredients that arrived from Istanbul, from Anatolia, from the eastern Mediterranean. Bougatsa at dawn. Souvlaki in the afternoon. Meze at sunset. And running through all of it, threading the city together like a spice route in miniature, is anise.

The Aniseed Thread

Aniseed divides people. Those who love it really love it — find in its warm, slightly sweet, faintly liquorice character something deeply comforting and complex. Those who don't, really don't. But in Thessaloniki, aniseed is used with such confidence and context that it becomes something else entirely. It's in the ouzo poured into small glasses at harbour-side cafés as the sun drops. It's in the tsoureki bread braided and baked for celebrations. It's in the loukoumades — those extraordinary fried dough balls drizzled with honey — that the city's street food vendors have been selling for generations. In Thessaloniki, anise isn't a novelty. It's a thread connecting centuries.

Bottling the Harbour

When HOUSE OF POP chose Thessaloniki as one of our four cities for Herbs & Spices Collection, we wanted to capture that harbour-side warmth — the particular feeling of sitting somewhere ancient and beautiful with something aromatic in your hands, not quite sure what you're tasting but certain that you want more of it. Our Warm Aniseed popcorn is part of the Herbs & Spices Collection, and also features in the Mediterranean Collection bundle alongside Amalfi, Porto, and Marrakech — four cities, one sun-drenched corner of the world, and arguably the most cohesive quartet in the range. Don't take our word for it. . Visit Thessaloniki at our shop.