Botrini’s Athens: a former schoolhouse in Chalandri, and a kitchen in its second generation

Botrini’s is at Vasileos Georgiou B’ 24B, Chalandri, Athens, in a two-storey house with a red tile roof that was once the neighbourhood’s elementary school. A green garden wraps around it, and tables go out there through the long Greek summers. The dining room inside is arranged around an open-view kitchen, so the pass is in sight from the floor.

Botrini’s came out of Botrini’s Project in 2011, a television programme built on the idea of giving young people a direction through cooking. Ettore Botrini recruited 12 people with no restaurant experience to form the opening brigade, and ran the kitchen without the usual hierarchy: every member of the team worked as an equal under the chef. The first Michelin star came in 2014, two and a half years after the doors opened, and the kitchen has kept it: one Michelin star, held ten consecutive years.

There are two tasting menus, Peripatos and Varkada, at EUR 125 and EUR 175 a head, before drinks and cover. Service runs Tuesday to Saturday from 19:00.

The two menus

Both menus are named for something done slowly. Varkada is the Greek word for the kind of small-boat outing a family makes with nowhere to be, and peripatos for a walk whose only purpose is the walking. Each course of either menu arrives with a written card carrying the story behind the dish: a memory from the chef’s childhood, a piece of the Botrini family’s history, part of the kitchen’s thinking, or a habit from somewhere else, such as the Tuscan fishermen who marinated their catch in seawater. Guests can also sit at the chef’s table, inside the kitchen and directly in front of the pass, on a menu built for that table alone.

The hands in the kitchen

Ettore Botrini is a Greek-Italian chef, born and raised on Corfu, who took up cooking because his father loved it. He studied tourism management in Lausanne, then cooked in France and Spain, some of it beside Martin Berasategui. He is chef-patron of two restaurants: Botrini’s in Athens, and Etrusco on Corfu, named after his father. He speaks five languages.

Ilias Ntoukas has worked as Executive Research and Development Chef at Botrini’s since 2025. He walked into a kitchen by chance at 21 and left his studies in another field for it, then left Athens at 26 for kitchens abroad, among them Noma in Denmark, the Fat Duck in England and Quintonil in Mexico. He spent five years as sous chef at Hiša Franko, in the mountains of northwestern Slovenia, where he learned to cook with the ingredients a place has, and locality and sustainability became the principles he works to. One Greek critic, writing in January 2026, read his arrival as the Athens restaurant turning a page with the Botrini signature intact.

The cellar

More than 900 labels across two cellars sit behind the food, Greek and international. The list is weighted towards the Greek vineyard, and towards wines that suit this kitchen: Champagne, old vintages of Santorini Assyrtiko, German Riesling. Past that it reaches from the Cyclades and the wine regions of Italy and Portugal to the Moselle valley, Alsace, Chile and Australia.

What the kitchen keeps

The kitchen works to a zero-waste principle. Peel, trimmings and other matter usually thrown out become pickles, garum, which is a fermented fish sauce, and stocks. Seasonal ingredients come from small local producers. Peaches from the plains of Imathia, in northern Greece, are picked at full ripeness, put up in jars with elderflower syrup and brought out months later as the pre-dessert; their skins and stones become the house peach vinegar. The kitchen keeps plastic out and recycles, and the cards at the table explain why.

The restaurant’s emblem is Pegasus, the white winged horse, taken from Tuscany, which along with Corfu is one of Botrini’s two homelands. Wheat, olive oil and wine sit beneath it.

Chalandri

Chalandri has an identity of its own, away from the city’s tourist centre. It is a suburb of parks, red-tile houses and cycle paths, with the Rematia suburban woodland 10 minutes’ walk from the table. The restaurant counts the airport at 25 minutes by car and the Acropolis Museum at 20.

Who is this for

Botrini’s suits a guest who wants dinner to take a whole evening, and who is content to travel out of central Athens for it. The Chalandri centre is a short walk from the door: a knot of pedestrian streets with a busy bar scene, small cafes and shops, so the evening can begin or end outside the restaurant. The room serves until midnight, which gives the longer of the two menus the hours it needs, and a car is the straightforward way back into the city.