Artisanal reopened on Friday 12 December 2025 at the corner of Zirini and Kassaveti streets in Kifissia, a suburb in the north of Athens. For years the 1920s mansion and its garden had run as an all-day bar and restaurant. It came back as a restaurant only, with Giannis Parikos in the kitchen as executive chef and part-owner. The room was renovated from the floor up.

A mansion on Zirini

The address is one of the better known in the northern suburbs, and its architecture is the reason. The house dates from the 1920s, and the dining room sits inside a period orangerie, a conservatory of glass and black metal. In the warm months its roof and one side open onto the garden and its pergola. The room was built to be half outdoors, and it still is.

The renovation kept the structure and changed the style. It uses soft tones, natural materials and textured surfaces, and keeps the tall ceilings of the old Kifissia villas. The bar is cut from red Pentelic marble, the stone quarried on Mount Penteli outside Athens. High tables stand along the glass, facing the planting. The new room is quieter than the one it replaced, and much more serious.

The chef and his team

Parikos has cooked in rooms of this kind before. He worked in the Athens restaurants Hytra and Varoulko Seaside, and at the resorts of Costa Navarino and Sani Resort. He runs his own restaurants on the island of Paros, SeaRocks and Kedros. In New York he was executive chef at Delos, on West 47th Street. Artisanal is his return to an Athens dining room of his own.

Kostas Terzoudis, who has worked with him for many years, signs the menu with him. Vlassis Theodorakopoulos chose the wine list, which runs to more than 100 Greek and international labels.

The menu

The kitchen calls its cooking “comfort fine dining”. Taste comes first. The kitchen starts from excellent raw ingredients and uses technique to serve the produce, leaving its flavour intact. The dishes follow that idea. A potato risotto comes with a crisp oxtail croquette, parmesan and truffle. A sea urchin carpaccio comes with lime, seaweed and pearls of ponzu, a Japanese citrus sauce. Lamb shoulder is cooked slowly for 12 hours and served with celery, apple, burnt onion and tarragon. Scallops come with parsnip, marjoram and prosciutto, and lemon tagliolini with crab, chilli and basil.

Each of these dishes is plain to describe. The ambition lies in the cooking and the sourcing, and that is hard to keep up across a whole menu.

From the reopening, the restaurant served dinner from Tuesday. On Sunday it served a family-style lunch, with platters set down for the table to share. That is a confident choice for a new fine-dining room, and it shows how the owners see the place.

Kifissia and the north of Athens

For a decade, much of the best cooking in Athens has been in the city centre: in Pangrati, in Kolonaki and in the streets around Syntagma Square. The northern suburbs kept their wealth and their gardens but lost much of their good food. Kifissia in particular has long had more handsome dining rooms than reasons to book one.

Parikos has taken a stake in a landmark building, stripped it back and reopened it as a restaurant. With his record, that is a bet that the north of the city will change. The building was always the finest part of the place. It lacked a kitchen of the same standard, and since 12 December 2025 it has had one.

Who is this for

Artisanal suits a guest staying north of the city centre, and anyone happy to drive out along Kifissias Avenue for dinner. At night the orangerie is hung with white globe lamps, and white-clothed tables stand against floor-to-ceiling glass with the lit garden beyond. Inside, a long banquette runs beside a wall of vertical timber battens. The bar has a woven terracotta-red front, and round stone tables are laid with monogrammed napkins. Seen from the garden, the glass room stands behind a climbing plant on an iron arch.