Byzantino reopened on 23 April 2026, the day Conrad Athens The Ilisian unlocked its doors on Vasilissis Sofias. The dining room of the former Hilton Athens returns as Byzantino Grande Brasserie — the first grande brasserie in the city, in the French sense of the word — with Angelos Lantos leading the culinary direction across the hotel and Byzantino as his flagship, and interiors drawn by the Paris interior architect Tristan Auer.

The room that closed

Hilton Athens opened in 1963, the first international chain hotel in Greece, behind sculpted marble façades by Yannis Moralis that run to 620 m² and read as a modernist argument with classical myth. Byzantino was its dining room, and for close to 60 years it was where the city ate when the occasion warranted it. The hotel closed on 31 January 2022, and the room went with it.

What has come back is not a restoration of what stood there. The building — the work of Emmanuel Vourekas, Prokopis Vassiliadis, Antonis Georgiades and Spyros Staikos — has reopened as an urban resort of 278 rooms and suites, with 9 dining rooms and bars across the wider Ilisian and the largest outdoor pool in Athens. AvroKO drew the hotel’s interiors. Byzantino was given to another hand.

The room Auer drew

Tristan Auer trained at ESAG-Penninghen in Paris and opened his own practice there in 2002. At the Hôtel de Crillon he drew the lobby and reception, the Brasserie d’Aumont and the cigar lounge, one of several decorators on that restoration; when Les Bains Douches stopped being a nightclub and became a hotel in 2015, the interiors were his. His Byzantino sets mid-century line against Byzantine arch.

The room’s modernist central dome has been drawn into sharper focus, a circular bar set at its centre and the Byzantine-style arches redrawn and lit. Wrought-iron armchairs, striped upholstery, a mosaic floor in cream, terracotta and honey — the register is the 1950s French Riviera rather than the Athens of the same decade, which is the more interesting of the two choices available. A courtyard and the café beside it carry the room outdoors; brasserie and café together seat 306.

The kitchen

Angelos Lantos was born in Messolonghi in 1972 and came to Athens at the age of 4. He entered the kitchen at Spondi in 2005 as sous chef to the French chef Arnaud Bignon, and took the head chef’s post in 2012 when Bignon left. He arrives at Conrad Athens The Ilisian with 17 years of that kitchen behind him.

The lineage explains what the menu is trying to do. A Greek chef formed in a French kitchen in Athens is the plausible author of a card that runs in two columns and declines to blend them.

The table

The card runs as two menus, one French and one Greek, each standing on its own and neither borrowing from the other. On one side: Burgundy snails, a terrine of foie gras, tarte flambée, Challans duck, a beef tartare finished at the table. On the other: briam read anew, goat cooked slowly with orzo and ladotyri, Greek prawns cured lightly with lemon and rock samphire. Crêpes Suzette are finished at the table too, which says plainly enough what kind of room this means to be.

Two trolleys do the theatre. One carries cheeses from Greece and France between the tables; the other is given over to desserts. A cheese master keeps a walk-in cheese room behind the first, and its cheeses may be bought to take home. A chocolaterie and patisserie sit inside the restaurant rather than behind it.

The room runs long. Breakfast from 6.30am, lunch from 12.30, dinner to 11pm, and the café alongside it open from 7am until 1am. That spread is the whole point of the form — a grande brasserie exists to be used on a Tuesday as readily as on an anniversary.

What it changes

Athens has had French cooking, and it has had grand hotel dining rooms. It has not had a grande brasserie: the particular Parisian institution that gives the same room to the same city all day, at every register, without altering its manners between services. Byzantino is the first, and it has taken the address where Athenians already knew to go.

For a guest staying elsewhere in the city, that is the useful part. The hotel’s own account has the room drawing Athenians and travellers together from morning to night, and the hours bear it out.

The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.