Gallina is a dining room of 105 sq m in Koukaki, a central Athens neighbourhood a few minutes’ walk from the Acropolis, and it seats 38. Its origin is a collector’s. Philippos Tsangrides owns it, and he built it as a platform for his collection, his travels and his own culinary culture, in front of an audience small enough to notice the detail. At that size the room could be drawn whole, so the fittings were made for it as much as the art was.
The ground floor is one high-ceilinged hall. A banquette runs along the entrance wall, marble tables made for the room stand in front of it, and the bar and the open kitchen are at the back. Wood is the first material a guest reads, in a sweet colour that makes the hall feel close, with marble and stainless steel absorbed into it. The chairs are stainless steel with a gel cushion, a soft and surprising texture.
The interior is by LOT office for architecture with Objects of Common Interest, its sibling design studio, the practice of Leonidas Trampoukis and Eleni Petaloti. Their focal point is a tube light column made for the room, which extends to the ceiling and draws the eye in from the street outside. In front of it hangs a hand-knotted wool and silk tapestry by the artist Jannis Varelas. The floor is a mosaic of Greek marble pieces and ceramic tiles made for the room by the artist Vasilis Papageorgiou. The light above all of it is low and deliberate, from small pendants and from wall sconces designed by Charlotte Perriand.
A stainless-steel staircase at the back leads to a more secluded mezzanine, given over to wine tasting and private dinners, where wooden display walls hold the bottles. The wine carries on down into the basement, which reads as a wooden tunnel lit by a 90-degree tube light, the ground-floor column turned on its side.
The kitchen is Pavlos Kyriakis, who cooked at Benu in San Francisco and at Azurmendi in Bilbao before he came back to Athens. Gallina opened in late 2023, with an a la carte menu in a French bistro register.
What the kitchen makes
Almost everything starts in the room. Kyriakis and his cooks churn their own butter and make their own stocks, pasta, bread, ice cream and pickles. The produce is Greek and Mediterranean, the techniques run from the traditional to the modern, and the hand is French. The signature dish is a whole chicken, cooked slowly on a wood-fired rotisserie and finished with beurre blanc and fresh truffle. The other plate to order is a wagyu beef and Greek red shrimp tartare, which sells out most days.
The cellar
Giannis Gougoutoudis is the head sommelier and the list is his. It reaches about 1,000 bottles, around 40 by the glass, drawn from around the world, hundreds of them rare. The weight falls on the Old World, mostly French, Italian and Greek, and on growers who intervene little. A tasting happens upstairs on the mezzanine, away from the tables, with the bottles on the wall beside the glass, and the wine rooms carry on below it.
The second room
The model has since travelled to Crete. Domes Zeen Chania, from July 2024, announced a partnership under which Gallina would run one of its two restaurant spaces, with Kyriakis’s menu. The Athens room is the original, and the one the art and the fittings were made for.
Who is this for
Gallina suits a guest who likes a small hall and takes an hour over a wine list. It serves dinner only, Monday to Saturday, from 7pm, which leaves the whole afternoon for the Acropolis a few minutes up the road. The register is warm and low-lit, there are works by Greek artists on the walls, and the kitchen is open to the room. An evening for two or four, taken slowly.
