Vasilis Kyritsis

Coming Up

Athens nightlife trained the first part of Vasilis Kyritsis’s bar work in the most practical way possible: through service speed, repetition, and the need to stay steady when the room turns up its pace. Behind the bar at clubs in Athens, he learned the core mechanics of the trade — quick hands, a controlled voice, and the habit of reading a crowd before it asks to be read. In 2006, he moved to Athens Island Club in Athens and kept building that discipline there until 2014, working in a city where the bar can be both high-energy and close-knit. By 2014, the work had moved beyond service alone and into ownership and form. Kyritsis became co-founder of The Clumsies, turning bar experience into a structure he could help shape. He is also co-owner of Line, which extends that same line of thinking into a second project. The shift runs from bartender to builder: from making drinks to making the places they are made in.

Where They Are Now

The Clumsies in Athens and Line in Athens are the current anchors of Vasilis Kyritsis’s work, both part of the city’s contemporary bar conversation. His naming of The Clumsies points to a bar identity that does not rely on polish as a badge. “One of the reasons we named the bar The Clumsies is that I have always had a touch of clumsiness. I drop things sometimes.” It is a self-aware line, and it fits a bar culture that can afford to be precise without pretending to be perfect. That outlook also frames how Kyritsis talks about bartending itself. The work, for him, is not only technical; it is about giving. His own words place the trade in the register of hospitality as a shared act, with warmth as part of the service rather than an accessory to it. In that sense, the bar is not just a technical environment but a social one, shaped as much by attitude as by execution.

Signature

Vasilis Kyritsis’s signature dishes include Circle of Life (Vodkatini) and Above & Beyond Punch. The names suggest drinks built with a clear point of view, the sort of menu items that carry a bar’s identity in a few words. They sit in the same register as the projects he has helped shape: distinct, deliberate, and grounded in hospitality as a craft.

In Their Words “One of the reasons we named the bar The Clumsies is that I have always had a touch of clumsiness. I drop things sometimes.” “Bartending is a job about love and that’s what I like, to share love with others.”