Above the private beach at Ornos Bay, Mykonos, Buddha-Bar Beach is the first Buddha-Bar to stand on a beach. The group behind it began in Paris in 1996 and had built restaurants, lounges, hotels and spas across Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Santa Marina is where the idea went to the water. The brand’s other beach clubs include Crete, Milos, Bodrum, Abu Dhabi and Mauritius, and the Mykonos room came before all of them.
The kitchen is seafood and Asian, and the room keeps one continuous service, 13:00 to 01:00. Menus carry fusion cooking with a Mediterranean and Greek inflection alongside the fixed Buddha-Bar dishes, among them the signature sushi rolls, deep-fried calamari and a Wagyu beef fillet. The group’s own chefs set those menus and rotate them, and they are written to take in Mykonian seafood and produce. The resort calls the result its Aegean interpretation of the Buddha-Bar lifestyle, and describes the atmosphere as elegant and sophisticated.
The turn of the day
The Buddha-Bar register holds all day, through lunch and the afternoon, and it gathers at sunset into DJ sets that run late into the night. The restaurant publishes a lunch menu, a dinner menu and a list for wine and cocktails, and the 12 hours between 13:00 and 01:00 are one service rather than two sittings. Tables are held on the restaurant’s own line, +30 2289 026570.
A season programmed by name
Santa Marina put its 2026 events calendar out under three themes, chefs, music and wellness, and most of the music was set at Buddha-Bar Beach. The resort named its season for the first time in 2026 and built it as a sequence of evenings across the summer. The programme named Alessandro Ristori and The Portofinos as guest artists at Buddha-Bar Beach, and placed a Female Sound Artists series at the same tables, opening with Scarlett Lapidus and naming Kim Turnbull and Fiona Jane as well. Two of the season’s recurring evenings went there too: a Sunset Bourbon Experience called The Ritual, and a Rhythm Ritual called The Pulse. The chefs series sat at Elais, the resort’s Greek dining room, with an evening of strings at sundown, and the wellness retreats at Ginkgo Spa.
The house that took the partnership
Santa Marina is a family house, and the restaurant sits inside it. Elias Papageorgiou bought the hillside in 1979, a plot with a chapel, a windmill and a pigeon house on it, and built the first 12 bungalows in 1986. The main building opened with 20 rooms in 1994, the first luxury hotel on Mykonos, and the second and third followed in 1998 and 1999, each with another 20. His daughter and only child, Christiana, took over in 2012, and the Buddha-Bar partnership was taken under her. Santa Marina marked 40 years in 2026.
The beach below the restaurant runs 150 metres, with a private mooring bay where guests and visitors tie up their boats, so a table here can be reached from the water as readily as from the road. That beach came with the peninsula adjoining the original plot, which Elias acquired in 1989, and it is the resort’s own.
Who is this for
It suits a reader who wants one table for the whole arc of a day, and who likes the music to come to them. The setting is sand at the foot of the terrace, the Mykonian hillside behind and open water across the view. The register runs from an unhurried lunch in the sun to the hour the DJs take over. Come at the start of service for the seafood and the quiet, and stay for the sunset.
