Byzantino reopened on 23 April 2026, the day Conrad Athens The Ilisian opened its doors on Vasilissis Sofias Avenue. The former dining room of the Hilton Athens came back as Byzantino Grande Brasserie. It is the first grande brasserie in the city, in the French sense of the term: a large restaurant that serves the whole day. Angelos Lantos leads the cooking across the hotel, with Byzantino as his main restaurant. The interiors are by the Paris interior architect Tristan Auer.
The room that closed
Hilton Athens opened in 1963 as the first international chain hotel in Greece. Its façades carry sculpted marble by the artist Yannis Moralis, 620 m² of it, a modernist take on classical myth. Byzantino was its dining room, and for close to 60 years Athenians went there when an occasion called for it. The hotel closed on 31 January 2022, and the room closed with it.
The building has been remade. It was designed by Emmanuel Vourekas, Prokopis Vassiliadis, Antonis Georgiades and Spyros Staikos, and it has reopened as an urban resort of 278 rooms and suites. Across the wider Ilisian there are nine dining rooms and bars and the largest outdoor pool in Athens. AvroKO designed the hotel’s interiors, and Byzantino went to a different designer.
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 in Paris he designed the lobby and reception, the Brasserie d’Aumont and the cigar lounge, as one of several designers on that restoration. When Les Bains Douches, a Paris nightclub, became a hotel in 2015, the interiors were his. At Byzantino he set mid-century lines against Byzantine arches.
He gave the room’s modernist central dome more emphasis, with a circular bar at its centre, and redrew and lit the Byzantine-style arches. There are wrought-iron armchairs, striped upholstery and a mosaic floor in cream, terracotta and honey. The style recalls the French Riviera of the 1950s more than the Athens of the same decade, which is the more interesting of the two choices. A courtyard and the café beside it take the room outdoors, and together the brasserie and café seat 306.
The kitchen
Angelos Lantos was born in Messolonghi in 1972 and moved to Athens at the age of four. In 2005 he joined the kitchen at the Athens restaurant Spondi as sous chef, or second in command, to the French chef Arnaud Bignon. When Bignon left in 2012, Lantos became head chef. He came to Conrad Athens The Ilisian with 17 years in that kitchen.
That history explains the menu. A Greek chef trained in a French kitchen in Athens is a natural author for a menu in two columns that keeps them apart.
The table
There are two menus, one French and one Greek. Each stands on its own, and neither borrows from the other. The French side has Burgundy snails, a terrine of foie gras, tarte flambée (a thin flatbread from Alsace), Challans duck and a beef tartare finished at the table. The Greek side has a new version of briam, the Greek dish of baked vegetables, as well as goat cooked slowly with orzo and ladotyri, a cheese kept in olive oil. There are also Greek prawns lightly cured with lemon and rock samphire, a coastal plant. Crêpes Suzette are finished at the table too, which makes clear what kind of room this aims to be.
Two trolleys bring theatre to the room. One carries cheeses from Greece and France between the tables, and the other carries desserts. A cheese master looks after a walk-in cheese room behind the first trolley, and guests may buy its cheeses to take home. A chocolaterie and patisserie sit inside the restaurant itself, in view.
The room keeps long hours. Breakfast runs from 6.30am, lunch from 12.30pm and dinner to 11pm. The café alongside opens from 7am until 1am. Those hours are what the form is for: a grande brasserie is meant to serve an ordinary Tuesday as well as an anniversary.
What it changes
Athens has had French cooking, and it has had grand hotel dining rooms. Until now it had no grande brasserie, the Parisian institution that gives the city one room all day, from a coffee to a celebration, with the same manners at every service. Byzantino is the first, and it opened at an address Athenians already knew.
Who is this for
Byzantino suits a guest staying anywhere in Athens who wants one room for breakfast, lunch or a late dinner, and enjoys a little theatre at the table. The hotel describes it as a place to gather and celebrate, from morning coffee to late-night conversation, for Athenians and travellers alike. Ochre banquettes line marble-topped tables on turned wooden pedestals. A terracotta-walled room has tall arched windows onto greenery, with potted palms around a carved stone column. At breakfast, carved wooden doors open onto breads and pastries beneath a candle-ring chandelier.
