dex.Silo.01 is the pop-up fine-dining room of the Dexamenes Seaside Hotel, and its setting is one 1920s wine silo tank, 5,000 hectolitres, at Kourouta Beach, Amaliada, Ilia. The tables are laid inside the old wine tank, and video projection and music make the rest of the room.
It runs as a pop-up themed degustation, booked by date, with each theme taken from art, wine, local culture, conscious wellbeing or science. The cooking is modern Greek: Gikas Xenakis, executive chef; Stavros Kousis, chef.
The 2026 run turned on a single ingredient of the region, the tomato of Elis. Traditional recipes sat beside contemporary readings of them across a multi-course degustation, and the dinners ran on named dates between 8 May and 30 September 2026.
The tank and the shore
The winery was built on the sea so that ships could be loaded with wine straight from the tanks before they sailed for the overseas markets. Currants had been the main export of the Greek kingdom since its liberation in 1830, and when that trade collapsed in 1910 the unsold crop had to become something else, so the first wineries and distilleries went up. The structures on the site have stood since the 1920s and were left derelict for decades before the conversion.
Two concrete blocks dominate the site, each divided lengthwise into two rows of ten wine-storage tanks. At about 5 metres by 6 they were the right size for bedrooms, and that is what they became. Under the name dex.Silo.01, a silo tank is turned over to a changing set for each edition, which is how one room carries several programmes in a season.
Much of the old plant was kept. The manholes and pipes in the face of each tank are still there, with the patina on the inside walls, and the slabs cut out of the tank walls to make doorways were laid in the courtyard water as stepping stones. A shallow pool separates the two rows of rooms, and the steel drums that give the hotel its logo stand in it, where a guest can walk out to them and hear how sound moves over the concave walls. Local grape and currant varieties have been planted along the edges of the garden.
Kourouta Beach faces the clear water of the Ionian. Ancient Olympia, Ancient Elis and the medieval Chlemoutsi Castle are all within reach of it, and the wine route of Elis runs to more than eight estates, Mercouri and Brintziki among them.
The programme
The same tank has held more than one idea. A fermentation programme under the name zymosis put winemakers, brewers and bakers in the room with the kitchen, and a Breaking Bread series took bread itself as the subject. Traditional, Illegal is a run of food-activism dinners set against the ban on baking bread over an open fire and against compulsory milk pasteurisation, and for the return of old plant seeds. Full Moon, No Moon sets a dinner to the lunar month, with video and a composed soundtrack.
Kantharos Gatherings runs alongside it, a series of artistic wine tastings conceived and curated by Eleni Tranouli, in which the aromas in a glass are used to draw out a memory.
Through the summer of 2026 one of the historic silo tanks was turned over on Sundays to an open-air cinema with CINEBUR, in the manner of the therinó, the Greek open-air cinema of the summer months.
The two original stone out-buildings hold the dining and event rooms. The taverna has an open kitchen with a communal table used for wine tastings and cooking workshops, and a terrace outside it; the building facing it is equipped for exhibitions, workshops and lectures, where resident artists present work through the season. dex.Machina, the hotel’s gastro-tavern, is in the ex-Engine Room of the post-war winery, and dex.Lab, its experimental bar, serves light meals. Both sit apart from the silo.
A silo tank, the vineyard or a beach spot may be privatised, and the kitchen curates the dinner for whoever takes it.
Who is this for
This suits a reader who likes to fix a summer evening to a date, and anyone who takes as much pleasure in concrete, steel and timber as in a plate. Arrival is from the road behind, through a glass-walled pavilion under a louvred plywood canopy, then the boutique, then the courtyard garden. Guests in the sea-front rooms have the sunset from a canopied patio and a raised promenade over the sand to walk in to dinner. Dexamenes says weather can move an outdoor evening, so the date is worth checking before you travel.
