Lauda is the house restaurant of Andronis Boutique Hotel, high on the cliff at Oia on Santorini, and it is the oldest table in the village. It serves from a semicircular terrace over the caldera, and the French chef Emmanuel Renaut, who cooks in the Alps, writes its menu.
Lauda opened in 1971, the first restaurant in Oia, when the village held 306 people. It also carried Oia’s only telephone line.
Orestis Sotiriou, head chef, runs the kitchen day to day, and he is new to it for 2026. He blends contemporary technique with Greek flavours, drawing on the island’s own traditions. Written on Emmanuel Renaut’s advice, the menu is French in method and Greek in material. Renaut is the executive chef, and he counts Lauda among his own houses, alongside Flocons de Sel, the house he keeps at Megeve in the French Alps.
The room
The terrace is semicircular and hangs in the void above the caldera. The tables sit symmetrically in a single line along the railing, with the drop directly below, and the space around them is generous. The house seats indoors as well, and both rooms are smoke-free.
The French hand
Renaut is a Meilleur Ouvrier de France, the title France gives a master of a craft. He trained in Paris, beginning at Les Ambassadeurs, the dining room of the Hôtel de Crillon, and then spent seven years as second to the chef Marc Veyrat at the Auberge de l’Eridan. He ran the kitchen at Claridge’s, the London hotel, before he returned to the mountains and settled at Megeve. He forages wild herbs, roots and flowers for his cooking.
His other houses are in the mountains: La Table Gastronomique, the dining room at Flocons de Sel, and Le Prieuré in the centre of Megeve, the Auberge du Bois Prin at Chamonix, Le Boitet at Saint-Gervais and the Hôtel des Horlogers at Le Brassus in Switzerland. Lauda is the only one outside France and Switzerland. Its kitchen buys from the island’s fishermen, producers and farmers, and Renaut picks the Santorini produce himself.
The chefs flown in
Andronis runs a gastronomy festival across its Santorini restaurants. A visiting chef cooks a menu written for the occasion in one of the group’s rooms, for two nights, and then the room goes back to its own kitchen. The festival takes in established names and newer ones. Four chefs came in 2026, and Lauda took two of them.
Renaut cooked there himself on 7 and 8 July 2026, setting his Alpine cooking against the Mediterranean in a tasting menu the house billed as mountain to sea. Rafael Cagali, chef-patron of Da Terra in London, cooked on 13 and 14 July 2026 with a menu written for the festival; his cooking draws on Brazilian and Italian roots and on his travels through Latin America, Italy and Spain. The other two visits went to Lycabettus, another of the group’s restaurants on the island. Mickael Viljanen, chef-patron of Chapter One in Dublin, cooked there on 26 and 27 July 2026, and Alex Dilling, chef-patron at the Hotel Café Royal in London, on 9 and 10 August 2026.
At table
The kitchen serves three sittings a day, every day: 8am to 11am, 1pm to 4pm, 7pm to 10.30pm. No children under 13, no pets, no smoking, indoors or out.
Who is this for
Lauda suits a reader who likes to know who writes a menu and who cooks it, and who wants the island’s own fish and vegetables on the plate. The mood is quiet and grown-up: a long curve of tables above the caldera, close enough to the railing to feel the drop, and a room free of cigarette smoke. It suits a first visit to Santorini as readily as a tenth, and a guest of the hotel upstairs has the shortest walk to it.
