What is the most popular Greek food?

Moussaka and souvlaki are the most internationally recognized Greek dishes, but within Greece, everyday staples like fasolada (bean soup), horiatiki (village salad), and fried zucchini are just as beloved.

No, Greek food is generally not spicy in the chili-pepper sense. The flavor is built on herbs (oregano, dill, mint), warm spices (cinnamon, allspice), lemon, and olive oil. Greek food is a very safe choice if you're sensitive to heat.

What should vegetarians order at a Greek restaurant?

Greek cuisine has excellent vegetarian options: spanakopita, tiropita (cheese pie), horiatiki salad, dolmades, fasolada, gigantes plaki (baked giant beans), grilled halloumi, and any vegetable meze.

What's the difference between gyros and souvlaki?

Gyros is made from meat cooked on a vertical rotisserie, similar to shawarma. Souvlaki is grilled on skewers. Both are served in pita with tzatziki and vegetables, but the texture and flavor of the meat differs significantly.

Is Greek food expensive?

In Greece itself, food is quite affordable at local tavernas and souvlaki shops. In the US, a Greek restaurant meal is typically mid-range pricing, similar to Italian restaurants.

What is the most popular Greek dish?

Souvlaki and gyros are the most widely eaten Greek dishes both in Greece and internationally. Moussaka is the most famous traditional home-cooked dish. For appetizers, tzatziki and spanakopita are beloved staples found at virtually every Greek restaurant.

Is Greek food healthy?

Yes, Greek food is considered one of the healthiest cuisines in the world. It's the foundation of the Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes olive oil, fresh vegetables, fish, legumes, and whole grains. Studies consistently link this eating pattern to longer life expectancy and reduced risk of heart disease.

Rotisserie Chicken vs Cooking Your Own: I Ran the Numbers on a Week of Cheap Dinners

There is a moment in every grocery store where you walk past the hot case, smell the chicken, and do a small piece of mental math. The bird under the heat lamp is around $5 to $8. The raw whole chicken in the refrigerated aisle, four steps away, is often about the same. One of them is already cooked. The other one asks for ninety minutes and a hot oven.

That comparison bothered me enough to actually test it. For two weeks I alternated: one week I bought the hot rotisserie bird, the next I roasted my own, and I tracked what I spent, how long it took, how many meals I got, and — the part I did not expect to matter most — how the leftovers held up on day three.

The answer is not "one is obviously better." It's that they are good at completely different things, and most people are buying the wrong one for their actual week.

What I actually compared

I kept it deliberately narrow, because "is cooking cheaper" turns into a philosophy debate if you let it.

Option A: A supermarket rotisserie chicken, bought hot, eaten that night, leftovers stripped and used for two more meals.
Option B: A raw whole chicken of roughly the same weight, roasted at home with salt, pepper, olive oil, half a lemon and whatever herbs I had, then used identically.

Same household, same two people, same three meals: dinner the first night, chicken sandwiches or wraps the next day, and a soup or fried rice on day three with the carcass or the scraps.

The birds were similar sizes — roughly 1.4 to 1.8 kg (3 to 4 lb) once cooked. Rotisserie chickens are usually smaller than they look, because they have already lost water weight in the machine. A raw 2 kg chicken and a cooked 1.5 kg rotisserie chicken are closer to equivalent than the sticker suggests, and that single fact quietly changes the whole comparison.

The price math, side by side

Here is what I recorded. Prices are what I paid at a mid-range supermarket, and they will drift depending on where you live and when you read this — but the shape of the numbers has been stable for years, and that's the part worth using.

	Store rotisserie chicken	Roasting my own
Bird cost	$6.99 (Costco members pay $4.99; UK supermarkets run about £5–£7)	$8.50 for a 2 kg whole chicken at roughly $4.25/kg
Seasoning, oil, lemon	$0 — included	About $0.80
Oven energy (about 80 min)	$0	About $0.35–$0.60 depending on your rate
Total	≈ $7.00	≈ $9.70
Usable cooked meat	About 550–650 g	About 700–800 g
Cost per 100 g of meat	≈ $1.15	≈ $1.30
Hands-on time	2 minutes	10 minutes prep + 80 minutes waiting
Meals it covered (2 people)	3	3, with more left for a fourth

So the rotisserie chicken won on money — but by less than I expected, and by an amount that stops mattering the second you compare it to anything else. It was about $2.70 cheaper per bird. That is real, but it is not the "how do they even make money on this" gap the internet promises.

The gap is small because the store is not selling you a bargain. It is selling you a loss leader placed at the back of the shop so you walk past everything else. It works. Both times I bought one, I left with items I had not planned on.

Where roasting your own genuinely wins

Three things, and only three, but they are not small.

You get more meat. A raw bird you cook yourself has not spent four hours drying out under a lamp. I consistently pulled 100 to 150 g more usable meat off the home-roasted bird, which is most of an extra sandwich.

You get pan drippings. This is the thing nobody puts on a spreadsheet. The brown stuff on the bottom of the roasting tray, deglazed with a splash of water or wine, becomes gravy in four minutes. A rotisserie chicken arrives with a plastic tub of grease you throw away. Over a week, that gravy turned a plain plate of chicken and potatoes into something we actually looked forward to.

You control the salt. I'll come back to this, because it's the finding I did not go looking for.

Where the store bird wins, and it isn't really about money

It wins on the day you have no plan.

That sounds obvious until you look at when people actually cook. The 80 minutes a whole chicken needs are not 80 minutes of work — they are 80 minutes of being home, of your oven being occupied, of your dinner not existing yet at 6:30pm. If you got home at 6:15, the raw chicken is not an option. It is a decision you needed to make at 4:45.

What I noticed over two weeks is that I did not choose between "cheap" and "expensive." I chose between "dinner exists now" and "dinner exists at 8:10pm." On a Tuesday after a long day, $2.70 is a very cheap price for ninety minutes and the mental load of deciding at all. If deciding is the hard part for you, that's a whole separate problem — one I've written about in what to do when you genuinely can't decide what to eat, and the food roulette exists for exactly those nights.

The store bird also wins in summer. Running an oven at 200°C for an hour and a half in July heats your whole flat. That's a real cost that never shows up in the per-kilo price, and it's why I stop roasting whole chickens entirely between June and September — the same reasoning behind cooking when it's too hot to cook.

Three dinners I got out of one bird, both times

This part worked identically for both options, and it's where the real savings live. One chicken should never be one meal.

Night one — the plate. Legs and thighs, roast potatoes or rice, something green. Twenty minutes if the chicken is already cooked.

Night two — the cold meat meal. Breast meat sliced into sandwiches with mayo, mustard and pickles, or shredded into a wrap with yogurt, cucumber and hot sauce. My favourite version: chicken, cooked rice, cucumber, spring onion, sesame oil, soy sauce. Five minutes, no heat.

Night three — the scraps meal. Everything left, including the bits you scrape off the back and the little oysters near the spine. Fried rice, chicken and sweetcorn soup, or a quick noodle bowl. If you have twenty minutes, simmer the carcass with an onion, a carrot and a bay leaf while you eat night two, and you have stock for night three at zero extra cost.

That last step is the only place the price comparison flips decisively. Rotisserie carcasses make a workable stock, but a heavily seasoned one — you taste the store's rub in it. The home-roasted carcass gave a cleaner, more useful stock. If you cook a lot of soups and risottos, roast your own. Otherwise this is a rounding error. There's more of this kind of stretching in my cheap meal ideas and meal prep write-ups.

The sodium difference is bigger than the price difference

This is the thing I'd want to know if someone else had run this test.

Supermarket rotisserie chickens are injected or soaked in a salt solution before they go on the spit. That's not a scandal — it's what keeps them juicy after hours under a lamp — but it means a single serving can carry several hundred milligrams of sodium before you add anything. My home-roasted bird had exactly the salt I put on it, which was maybe a teaspoon across two kilos.

You can taste it directly. Eat the two side by side and the store bird reads noticeably saltier and slightly softer, almost brined. Some people prefer that. I did, for one meal. By day three of eating salty chicken, I didn't.

If you're watching sodium, the $2.70 you save is not the number to be looking at. Check the label on the bag — most chains print the nutrition panel on the bag or the shelf edge, and the numbers vary a lot between chains.

The texture problem on day two

Both birds reheat badly in a microwave. But they fail differently, and this decided it for me more than anything else.

Rotisserie chicken, refrigerated overnight, goes slightly gelatinous and holds the flavour of its rub. It's great cold, in sandwiches and salads, and mediocre reheated. Home-roasted chicken goes drier but neutral, which means it takes on whatever sauce you put it in — it disappears cleanly into curry, soup, or fried rice.

Practical rule I landed on: if your leftovers are going into cold things, buy the rotisserie. If they're going into cooked things, roast your own. That single sentence predicted my satisfaction better than price did.

So which should you buy?

I'm not going to pretend one of these is the right answer, because the test said clearly that it depends on the week you're having, not on the chicken.

Buy the store rotisserie if: you decide dinner after 5pm, you cook for one or two, your leftovers become sandwiches and salads, it's hot outside, or you know the honest alternative is takeout. Against a $22 delivery order, a $7 chicken covering three meals is not close.

Roast your own if: you're home in the afternoon anyway, you want gravy and stock, you're watching sodium, your leftovers go into soups and curries, or you're feeding three or more people and the extra 150 g of meat actually matters.

What I do now: rotisserie on weeknights, home-roast on Sundays. The Sunday bird makes the stock; the weeknight bird makes the week survivable. That is not a compromise, it's just using each one for what it's good at.

The mistake was ever treating this as a virtue test. Cooking your own is not automatically the disciplined choice, and buying the hot one is not laziness. One costs $2.70 more and gives you gravy. The other costs ninety minutes and gives you a Tuesday back.

FAQ

Is a rotisserie chicken actually cheaper than cooking your own?
Slightly — roughly $2 to $3 per bird in my testing, or about $0.15 per 100 g of meat. It's a real saving but a small one. The store sells it near cost to get you inside the shop, not because cooking is expensive.

How many meals should one chicken make?
Three for two people, comfortably, if you strip it properly and use the carcass. That works out to a bit over $1 per person per meal for the protein. Most people get one meal out of it and throw away half the value.

Is store rotisserie chicken unhealthy?
It's not junk food, but it is noticeably higher in sodium than a chicken you salt yourself, because of the brine that keeps it moist under the heat lamp. The meat itself is the same lean protein. If sodium matters to you, read the panel on the bag — it differs a lot by chain — or roast your own.

How long can I keep the leftovers?
Strip the meat off the bones the night you buy it and refrigerate it in a sealed container rather than leaving it on the carcass — it keeps better and you'll actually use it. Three to four days refrigerated is the standard food-safety guidance, and it freezes well shredded. Don't leave a hot chicken sitting on the counter for hours; get it cooled and covered within about two hours.

Does the rotisserie carcass make good stock?
Usable, but seasoned. You'll taste the store's rub in it, which is fine for a chicken noodle soup and distracting in a delicate risotto. A home-roasted carcass gives a cleaner base.

What if I only ever eat breast meat?
Then neither whole-bird option is your best buy. You're paying for legs and wings you won't eat. Buy the cut you actually want, or commit to using the dark meat in the day-three scraps meal — that's where most of the value of a whole chicken lives.

More comparisons like this one, plus the rest of the food writing, are collected on the blog.