Luxury & Fine D. Restaurants of Athens

Athens keeps its serious kitchens close together: several sit within walking distance of the Acropolis, the rest are strung along Syngrou Avenue and down the coast towards Vouliagmeni. What they share is a habit of building menus around Greek produce and Aegean fish rather than imported luxury goods, which is why the city's Michelin list reads nothing like Paris or Milan.

How Athens does fine dining

Three things shape the scene:

• The view is part of the bill. Rooftops and hillside terraces look onto the Acropolis, Lycabettus Hill or the Saronic Gulf, and the best tables are booked weeks ahead in summer for that reason alone.
• Greek cooking, rewritten. Chefs work from village material — trahana, wild greens, salted fish, goat — and rebuild it with modern technique rather than replacing it with French classics.
• Greek wine lists. Assyrtiko, Malagousia, Xinomavro and Agiorgitiko now dominate cellars that a generation ago would have been mostly imported.

Athens holds around a dozen starred restaurants, one of them with two stars: Delta, in Kallithea, which also carries a Michelin Green Star for its sourcing.

The starred rooms

Aleria

Aleria occupies a restored early twentieth-century villa on Megalou Alexandrou Street in Metaxourgeio, on the western edge of the centre, and its walled garden takes most of the covers from May onwards. Chef Gikas Xenakis cooks updated Greek food across two tasting menus, one built on land and sea, the other vegetarian. The restaurant appears in the Michelin Guide's Athens selection, though it does not hold a star.

CTC

CTC Urban Gastronomy is on Plataion Street in Kerameikos, with a terrace shaded by trees and a low-lit dining room behind it. Alexandros Tsiotinis serves a blind tasting menu of around eleven courses — nothing is announced in advance — built on modern Mediterranean cooking. One Michelin star.

Pelagos

Pelagos is the seafood restaurant of the Four Seasons Astir Palace at Vouliagmeni, roughly 20 km down the coast from central Athens. Chef Luca Piscazzi holds a Michelin star here for cooking that pairs Greek fish with Italian technique; the whole grilled fish, aged and herbed before it reaches the grill, is what most tables order.

Soil

Soil sits on Ferekidou Street in Pangrati, in a neoclassical house with a small garden. Tasos Mantis builds the menu around produce from small Greek growers, and the kitchen has been given both a Michelin star and a Green Star, the guide's separate award for sustainable sourcing.

Varoulko Seaside

Varoulko stands on the Mikrolimano marina in Piraeus, tables set a few metres from the moored boats. Lefteris Lazarou opened it in 1987 as the first fine-dining restaurant in the city with an all-seafood menu, working with fish most kitchens ignored, and in 2002 he became the first Greek chef to be awarded a Michelin star.

Hytra

Hytra occupies the sixth floor of the Onassis Stegi on Syngrou Avenue, with the Acropolis and Lycabettus Hill visible from the terrace. The kitchen sends out plates such as sea bass with parsley root, or pigeon with trahana and pistachio, in a dining room kept deliberately plain so the city does the decorating.

Spondi

Spondi opened in Pangrati in 1996, founded by Apostolos Trastelis, and in 2002 became the first restaurant in Greece to be awarded a Michelin star. The cooking is French with a Mediterranean accent, served in a neoclassical building whose courtyard, under bougainvillea and lemon trees, is the room to ask for.

Dining above the city

Dinner in the Sky

Dinner in the Sky hoists a single table and its guests 50 metres up on a crane, with the Parthenon and the Acropolis rock in direct view and the chefs cooking at the centre of the platform. Sittings are short, seats are strapped in, and four menus cover different dietary requirements.

Two of these kitchens are on the water rather than in the city — Varoulko at Mikrolimano and Pelagos at Vouliagmeni — which makes either of them a straightforward dinner after a day exploring the coast by gulet from Athens, since both sit within a short drive of the marinas the boats use.