The Nobu room that has looked over the Saronic Gulf since 2008

Matsuhisa Athens stands at Four Seasons Astir Palace Hotel Athens, 40 Apollonos Street, Vouliagmeni, on the Athens Riviera. The tables look over the Saronic Gulf.

It opened in October 2008, when the site was still the Astir Palace hotel complex. The estate carries the Four Seasons name now, and the restaurant sits within its grounds.

Rockwell Group of New York drew the room and Clark Johnson’s studio lit it. The restaurant’s own account calls the design minimal and organic, made to sit with the landscape around it, and by night the room is lit against the water. The operator publishes the room at 120 seats, with an average staff of 50.

Tony Vratsanos is executive chef and Thomas Kourakos head chef, and the two have written omakase menus for the house. Vratsanos is the sushi chef as well.

From Beverly Hills by way of Mykonos

The cooking traces to 1987, when Nobu Matsuhisa opened his first restaurant in Beverly Hills and brought his blend of Japanese and Peruvian cuisine to the public. A silhouette of the chef, then 38, was painted behind the sushi bar when the doors opened. The profile was still behind the bar 30 years on, and it had become the logo of the legacy he built from there.

The Greek chapter began on Mykonos. The Ioannidis family opened the Belvedere in Mykonos Town in 1995 as a four-star family boutique hotel, and Tasos Ioannidis joined his brother Nikolas in the business in late 2000. Over the seven years that followed they modernised the hotel under the creative direction of Rockwell Group and the lighting designer Clark Johnson, and the plan included a collaboration with Nobu Matsuhisa. Matsuhisa Mykonos opened first, and it was that room which later took a winter season at Badrutt’s Palace in St Moritz. The same design partnership and the same licence then travelled across to Vouliagmeni in October 2008, and a third Greek room followed at Avant Mar on Paros.

Nobu Matsuhisa cooked in Vouliagmeni himself on 22 and 23 June 2025, on the opening leg of that year’s run through the three Greek restaurants.

The rest of Europe came to the cooking by pop-up first. The two Greek rooms ran promotions of ten days to five months inside other hotels, among them the Baur au Lac in Zurich, the Ritz in Paris and the Mandarin Oriental in Munich. Munich opened as a room of its own in the last quarter of 2015, and Paris in the first quarter of 2016. Cala di Volpe in Costa Smeralda began the same way, as a pop-up for the 2018 summer season.

Matsuhisa Athens is one of ten Matsuhisa rooms in Europe, each of them inside a hotel: Mykonos at the Belvedere, St Moritz at Badrutt’s Palace, Munich at the Mandarin Oriental, Paris at Le Royal Monceau Raffles, Limassol at the Amara, Cala di Volpe in Costa Smeralda, St Tropez at the Château de la Messardière, Val d’Isère at Airelles and Paros at Avant Mar.

The Umi Bar

The Umi Bar is the restaurant’s separate drinking room. Martinis and cocktails are mixed there by the house bartenders and served with a range of Nobu tapas dishes, so a seat at the bar is a way into the cooking. The restaurant also runs events of its own: wine pairings, signature cocktail tastings and collaborations with visiting bartenders.

Who is this for

Matsuhisa Athens suits a guest who wants Japanese and Peruvian cooking at the water’s edge, and who is content to let dinner hold the evening. The setting is a hotel estate on the Vouliagmeni peninsula, the tables laid toward the sunsets over the Saronic Gulf. It reads well for a table of two and as well for a larger group, and a party arriving from a villa along the coast fits it as easily as a hotel guest does.