CHES is the fine-dining room at Calilo, the hotel on Papas Beach at Manganari, on Ios. The house describes it as a restaurant celebrating Cycladic cuisine: every course takes a different island of the Cyclades as its starting point, and the island is named with the dish. The room sits high in the rock, with its terrace out over the beach.
CHES is one of two restaurants on the property. The main Calilo room cooks from locally sourced ingredients and needs no booking; CHES opens in the evening, from 18:00 to 23:00, and takes no walk-ins. A reservation is required, and the house asks for it well in advance.
Ten islands are named on the menu: Naxos, Syros, Kythnos, Santorini, Kea, Amorgos, Ios, Mykonos, Folegandros and Sifnos. Each has its own dish, a traditional recipe rebuilt for this room. Nine courses come out nightly.
In the kitchen
Alexandros Tsiotinis is the executive chef and wrote the menu. Spyros Tzilis is the resident chef and runs it on the island, nine courses a night.
Tsiotinis trained in France, at Épicure with Éric Fréchon, at Arpège with Alain Passard and then at Astrance with Pascal Barbot. In 2015 he won the Mediterranean region of the S. Pellegrino Young Chef competition, and he opened CTC, his own restaurant in Athens, in the same year.
In 2026 the menu carried Syros as a dish called vouta, with smoked herring tarama, the flavours of a village salad and warm sourdough bread. Kythnos came as shrimp with cannelloni, shrimp mousse, shrimp tartare, roasted aubergine, tomato and oregano and smoked eel. Mykonos came as beef skirt with onion pie and handmade lard.
CHES took a Golden Hat in the 2026 Greek restaurant awards, the third year in a row it has done so.
The bay
Calilo opened in 2019 and was built from stone quarried on the site itself: 36 suites on 1,000 acres of protected land, with 6 miles of sand along the front of it. The house calls itself a sanctuary away from the clamour and the crowds of the Cyclades.
The hotel grows vegetables, salad leaves and herbs in an organic kitchen garden, keeps beehives for its honey and presses extra virgin olive oil from its own groves. What the sea gives up and what the land grows are what both kitchens cook from.
The owner, Angelos Michalopoulos, holds about a third of Ios, and with his family he has worked to keep that share of the island from being built over. The family funded the island’s first fire department, organised a study of its water resources, founded a donkey sanctuary and replanted more than 600 ancient olive trees in the hills around the hotel, saved from being cut for firewood on the mainland.
Getting there
Ios has no airport, which is the reason the island never took mass tourism. It lies between Santorini and Mykonos, so most guests fly to Athens or Santorini and continue by sea: the regular ferry from Piraeus takes 5 to 6 hours, the high-speed boat 3.5 hours, and the crossing from Santorini is 45 minutes.
Calilo keeps its own dock and helipad, and will arrange a private boat from Santorini for guests who would rather not take the ferry. By helicopter the island is 11 minutes from Santorini, 18 minutes from Mykonos and 52 minutes from Athens. A Calilo van meets guests at the ferry terminal and drives them the 45 minutes to the bay, over the mountains.
Who is this for
CHES suits a traveller who will book a long dinner weeks ahead and let the kitchen decide all of it, and who likes a familiar Greek recipe arriving as something else. It suits two people as readily as a table of friends. The bay is about 10 miles from Chora, whose bars draw a crowd of 18 to 24 year olds after dark. Ios was long a quiet haven for artists, and this southern corner of the island stays that way.
