Tips for an authentic breakfast in Greece: Keep it simple and you'll be well rewarded

Forget your fancy hotel breakfast rooms. Ignore the same-same international buffets with their French pastries and greying scrambled eggs. In Greece, you want to rise early, insinuate yourself into the tangled alleys of an old town, and find a rough wooden table outside a taverna.

This is where you want to be for breakfast, under the bulging meringue of a church dome in a whitewashed square with blue doors, where your only view might be of an old woman in black sweeping her doorstep, or a pair of cats slinking between geranium pots.

Here, as the day trembles on the edge of activity, you'll find your sweet spot of quiet and coolness as the sun's caress makes chimney pots blush. Breakfast on fresh bread, feta cheese and honey, perhaps accompanied by slices of cucumber and tomato. Keep breakfast in Greece simple and you're well rewarded.

Of course, even this breakfast isn't really Greek, but provided for the tourists. Like many Mediterranean people, the Greeks aren't much interested in breakfast, often making do with a koulouri (pretzel ring sprinkled with sesame seeds) or tyropites (cheese pie) snatched from a bakery. In Athens, commuters perform contortionist acts as they hang off straps in crowded buses with one hand while devouring their pastry with the other.

Still, your sit-down breakfast feels Greek, and if you avoid the posh places with their eggs benedict and flapjacks you can indulge in all the simple, wonderful foods that make Greek cuisine so enjoyable.

Want to add to your bread and feta? Ask for olives. Hamadhes olives look as if they're shrivelled up and have very large pits, but provide a pleasant nutty taste. Sometimes you get speckled green olives, stuffed with slivers of bright red chilli in a hidden explosion of taste.

The best are purplish kalamata olives, which have a strong, salty flavour and are fat, glistening and oily. As they're used mostly in cooking, you might have to wheedle them out of the tavern owner as a special favour.

Greek yoghurt is another sensation, and resembles nothing like the stuff you get in Australian supermarkets. Yoghurt made from cow's milk is slightly tart (top it off with thyme honey) but sheep's milk yoghurt is surprisingly sweet. Rich and creamy, it's a meal in itself.

You needn't fret if you can't find a good old-fashioned place for breakfast. Put together your own. Yoghurt sold in plastic containers or traditional clay pots is available from village dairies, where you can also buy ryzogala (rice pudding) and kremes (custards).

Bakeries provide the bread, although you might be led into a temptation of sugared almond biscuits, and pastries soaked in honey and pockmarked with pistachio nuts.

These takeaways allow you to pick your breakfast spot. Sit on a crumbling column amid the ruins of a warrior state now overgrown with jasmine and iris, or on the hillside of an island that plunges down to a scintillating sea, and tuck in. Get out of your hotel and go rogue. Breakfast will never be so enjoyable.