Alfredo’s Grand Dining is the winter fine-dining room in the private area of Regency Casino Thessaloniki, out on the airport road beyond the city. Apostolos Altanis is the executive chef. The kitchen is modern Mediterranean, made with first-rate raw materials and served in a formal room.
The address is the 12th km Thessaloniki-Airport national road, 57001, in the Macedonia airport district east of the city, so dinner there is a drive out and a drive back. The casino runs its own coaches on routes inside and outside the city for anyone who would rather not take a car.
Entry follows the casino’s own conditions. Guests must be over 21, with identification and registration. A table is taken by telephone, on +30 2310 491 199.
The season runs from October to April, and the room is shut through the summer months. Service is Wednesday to Sunday, 9pm to 3am, and the kitchen serves dinner and nothing else.
The chef
Apostolos Altanis was born in Argithea, in Karditsa, and grew up in Thessaloniki. He has been the chef here since at least 2017. In February 2022 he was also writing the menus at Ambrosia, the restaurant of the Hyatt Regency Thessaloniki, and at Alfredo’s Garden at the casino, and teaching at private schools, training cooks coming into the trade. He has regulars who travel to the city for his cooking.
The kitchen
The casino’s own account of the room puts high gastronomy and luxury together: creative Mediterranean cooking, a wide list of wines from Greek and foreign vineyards, and what it calls a setting of high aesthetics.
Altanis puts it more plainly. Speaking in February 2022, he said that any dish prepared with care, passion and attention to detail is unique, whether the care goes into the ingredients or the cooking, and that it matters to him that a menu carries dishes a guest will find nowhere else. At Ambrosia, he said, the cooking starts from Greek dishes and presents them more creatively.
The rooms around it
Alfredo’s is one of several places to eat and drink inside the complex. The others are ō kipos restaurant & bar, La Terrasse, the street-food counters at Piazza and Ian’s Bar, whose décor borrows from New York in the 1920s, and Vergina Theatro stands beside the casino. Alfredo’s is the one the casino calls its grand dining.
The city around it
More than a million people live in Thessaloniki, and after Athens it is Greece’s main centre of trade and industry. Its cooking carries the peoples who have passed through the city over the centuries, and what the land and the sea around it give: olive oil, feta and yogurt, and fish and vegetables in season. The city has run an annual food festival since 2011, and in 2021 it joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the gastronomy category, the only Greek city in that field. On the city’s own figures, more than 5,000 businesses there serve food, turning over 430 million US dollars a year between them and employing more than 50,000 people.
Alfredo’s predates that designation. Asked in February 2022 how he would describe the city’s cooking, Altanis called it a mishmash of peoples, aromas and flavours.
Who is this for
Winter visitors to Thessaloniki, and residents with a whole evening to give to one table. Altanis has guests who come to the city for his cooking alone, and this is the room to go to if that is the reason for travelling in the cold months. It suits a party that eats late and talks long, with nothing to get to afterwards. It suits a guest who wants Mediterranean cooking in the formal register, and who would rather stay at one table all evening than walk between places.
