The garden of the Megaron, the Athens Concert Hall, is where Hytra cooks. The address is 1 Petrou Kokkali Street, Athens 115 21, in Ampelokipoi, and the restaurant has a modern building in the grounds, which it shares with Fuga. There is a balcony where tables are set under the open sky and, inside, a room with art on its walls and a glass wall facing Mount Hymettus. Giorgos Felemegas has the kitchen, and what he cooks there is personal and modern: contemporary technique, and ingredients drawn from across Greece. He was already in post when the restaurant opened here in June 2024.
Some of the seasoning grows on the premises. The cooking is built on Greek ingredients and on herbs from the restaurant’s own kitchen garden, and that garden supplies the bar as well as the stove. The house describes the work as a redefinition of Greek gastronomic heritage, given contemporary expression in the cooking and in the way a plate is set down. The gourmet menu starts from traditional recipes and reworks them.
There is an à la carte, and there are three tasting menus: 105€ and 120€; Think Green, vegetarian, 90€. The menus change, so what reads on the page one month is not what arrives the next. Past plates have included red mullet in bourdeto sauce with wild greens and potato-cumin, short rib with chickpeas, carrot, Sitia’s sour milk and carob honey, langoustine with Florina peppers and basil, turbot with onion and scallop, and cinnamon spheres with tangerine and Greek yoghurt rose.
The bar works from the same shelf. Cocktails are built on Greek herbs and spices and on the traditional syrups, liqueurs and brandies that went out of use, with freshly squeezed juice and house-made syrups behind them, made to old recipes by modern method. Tapas come from the same ingredients as the menus, and there is a degustation tapas menu with cocktail pairing for anyone who wants to spend the evening at the bar.
The house counts wine as part of its own identity, and builds its list on Greek vineyards. What it says it is after is plainly put: good service and hospitality, a warm and homely room, a kitchen that keeps developing its approach to food, and Greek cuisine brought forward through Greek raw materials and Greek recipes.
The owner is Apostolos Trastelis, who also holds Spondi and Fuga. He studied pharmacy, founded Spondi in 1996, and has Fuga on the same Megaron site as Hytra. The name travels in summer as well: Galazia Hytra, Summer Senses Luxury Resort, Paros, 1 June to 31 August, on Punda Beach.
Three addresses in Athens
Hytra began in the former Vitrina space in Psyrri, where Herve Pronzato, Alain Parrodi and Yiannis Baxevanis each ran its kitchen before Nikos Karathanos took it over. In the spring of 2012 it moved to the sixth floor of the Onassis Stegi, on Syngrou Avenue, with Karathanos still leading, and stayed 12 years. In May 2024 it left for the Megaron and moved in beside Fuga, which belongs to the same group. For that first summer the two restaurants divided the ground between them: Fuga took the garden, and Hytra took the interior and the terrace on the first floor. The arrangement was described at the time as temporary, with a more central site under negotiation, and no new address has been announced.
Who is this for
Hytra suits a reader planning one long dinner in Athens and willing to leave the centre for it, out to Ampelokipoi and into the grounds of a concert hall. It works for two people with a whole evening ahead of them, for a vegetarian who wants a tasting menu of their own, and for anyone happy to take tapas and cocktails at the bar instead of a table. The mood runs warm rather than formal, under open Athenian sky.
