Artisanal reopened on Friday 12 December 2025, at the corner of Zirini and Kassaveti in Kifissia, and the change is not cosmetic. The 1920s mansion and its garden had run for years as an all-day bar and restaurant; it came back as a restaurant and nothing else, with Giannis Parikos in the kitchen as executive chef and part-owner, and the room 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, whose roof and one flank open in the warm months onto the garden and its pergola. It is a room built to be half outdoors, and it still is.
The renovation kept the bones and changed the register. Soft tones, natural materials, textured surfaces and the tall-ceilinged proportions of the old Kifissia villas; a bar cut from red Pentelic marble, with high tables set along the glass looking into the planting. It is a quieter room than the one it replaced, and a considerably more serious one.
The hands in the kitchen
Parikos is not new to rooms of this order. He cooked at Hytra and at Varoulko Seaside in Athens, and worked at Costa Navarino and at Sani Resort. He holds his own tables outside the city — SeaRocks and Kedros, both on Paros — and he took the kitchen at Delos in New York, on West 47th Street, as executive chef. Artisanal is his return to an Athenian dining room of his own.
Kostas Terzoudis, his collaborator of many years, signs the menu with him. Vlassis Theodorakopoulos assembled the wine list, which runs past 100 labels of Greek and international wine.
What comes out of it
The kitchen calls what it does comfort fine dining, which sounds like a hedge and is not. The premise is that taste comes first: excellent raw material, then technique used to serve the produce rather than to overwrite it. What arrives bears that out. There is a potato risotto finished with a crisp oxtail croquette, parmesan and truffle. There is a sea urchin carpaccio with lime, seaweed and pearls of ponzu. There is a lamb shoulder cooked slowly for 12 hours and served with celery, apple, burnt onion and tarragon. Scallops come with parsnip, marjoram and prosciutto; a lemon tagliolini with crab, chilli and basil.
None of these is a difficult dish to describe, which is the point of them. The ambition sits in the execution and in the sourcing, not in the conceit — a discipline easier to admire than to hold to across a full menu.
The week was shaped accordingly from the reopening: dinner from Tuesday, and on Sunday a lunch laid family-style, in platters set down for the table to divide. It is an unusually confident thing for a new fine-dining room to offer, and it tells you what the house thinks it is.
Why it matters north of the city
Athens has spent a decade concentrating its best cooking downtown, in Pangrati, Kolonaki and the streets off Syntagma. The northern suburbs kept the money and the gardens and lost much of the gastronomy, and Kifissia in particular has long had more handsome rooms than reasons to book one.
A chef with this record taking a stake in a landmark building, stripping it back and reopening it as a dining room rather than a lounge, is a wager on that changing. The building was always the finest part of the proposition. What it lacked was a kitchen of matching seriousness, and as of 12 December 2025 it has one.
For a guest staying north of the centre, or for anyone willing to make the drive out along Kifissias, the orangerie is worth the evening. The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.
