CTC Urban Gastronomy is a restaurant in central Athens, and it gives the guest nothing to choose from. One blind tasting menu, the Voyage, in 11 stages, is all the kitchen serves, and none of it is disclosed in advance. The address is 15 Plataion Street, Athens 104 35.
The name is a play on sound. It stands for σίτιση, sitisi, a formal Greek word for the giving and the taking of food, and the house intends it as a statement about the classic meeting the modern in one recipe. What the kitchen cooks is modern Greek, built on what it buys from local markets each day.
Alexandros Tsiotinis, chef and co-owner, runs it, and the house asks a guest to put the evening in the kitchen’s hands. It also asks for 48 hours’ notice of a special dietary requirement. Service runs Tuesday to Saturday, 19:00 to 00:30.
The Voyage
The 11 stages are built as a sequence, each one preparing the palate for the one after it, so the order carries as much of the cooking as any single plate does. The house counts the element of surprise as one of the things that make the evening, and the service staff name each course only as they set it down. The house describes the sequence as its own view of modern Greek gastronomy, bound to the scents, the tastes and the culinary history of the country. The kitchen suggests taking the wine pairing alongside the food.
The premises
The restaurant has a planted garden of trees and shrubs, and that urban terrace carries the summer service. Inside, the colours are gentle and the lamps are kept low. The house calls the premises new, and the garden the setting it wanted for the evening it has in mind.
The chef
Tsiotinis was born in Athens in 1986 and studied at Ferrandi Paris in 2007. He then cooked in other people’s kitchens for years, among them Spondi in Athens, Le Bristol in Paris and Perivoli in Santorini. He names Alain Passard, Hélène Darroze, Eric Frechon and Pascal Barbot as the chefs he learned from, and calls them his venerable teachers. At 25 he was executive chef at the Elounda Peninsula in Crete. He opened CTC in Athens in 2015, because he wanted a kitchen of his own: “After spending several amazingly interesting years in famous restaurants of the world, I did feel the need to find my own little harbour. A place to call home and where I would be able to create and serve my ideas, exactly as I conceive them.” He describes the restaurant he wants as a crossroad of tastes and trends, where modern and classic become one and today blends with yesterday and tomorrow. He also compares cooking to drawing, and an empty plate to a blank canvas waiting to be coloured in.
The cellar
The wine list is rewritten every week, so a new arrival in the cellar reaches it in the same week. Stavros Georgiou, the house sommelier, keeps it, and writes it to follow the kitchen as the dishes change. There is nothing to read in advance: the list waits in the restaurant, and the floor staff take a guest through it.
Who is this for
CTC suits a guest who would rather be cooked for than order, and who enjoys a kitchen that works through a long sequence of plates. Much of the cooking turns on classic dishes rebuilt, among them sea bass ceviche, pesto calamari and a tarte tatin remade. It takes a table of two with an evening to spare, or a first night in Athens. In summer the terrace is the table in demand, under the trees and open to the sky.
