Matsuhisa Mykonos has cooked in the open air since 2003. Its setting is Mansion Stoupa, Belvedere Hotel, Mykonos Chora, and the tables stand around the hotel pool with no roof over them. The sushi bar is outdoors as well, which the operator that runs the restaurant calls the only such arrangement in the world.
Nobu Matsuhisa and the Ioannidis siblings, who own the hotel, met in London in 2003 and joined forces to turn a mid-19th-century mansion into a restaurant. It opened that year, 2003, as a pop-up, and it has returned every season since. The restaurant opens for a season, late April to mid-October, and closes for the winter. The Matsuhisa name now stands over 11 locations, Mykonos among them.
The design is Rockwell Group, lit by Clark Johnson, and over seven years the same two names gave the rest of the hotel the same treatment, under a modernisation plan the Ioannidis brothers set running after 2000. On the operator’s 2018 record the room has 120 seats and runs on about 45 staff. The operator owns and manages the Belvedere, and it runs the Matsuhisa restaurants in partnership with the chef himself.
The ground under it
The estate came before the villa. In 1850 a rare fertile plot thrived on the outskirts of Chora, on an otherwise barren island, raised high enough to see out. The stately villa that went up on it was called Mansion Stoupa, and it caused a stir. From the early 1920s it took in French politicians and European artists as a holiday house, and Piero Aversa, an Italian American painter and socialite, made it his home away from home from 1970 and gave his dinners there. That villa is the restaurant today.
Another building on the property, raised in the 1850s, held the restaurant’s indoor room until 2017. It is now the Belvedere Mansion, one of the hotel’s residences.
What the kitchen sends out
The card carries the signatures the Matsuhisa name is known for. Black cod is the dish most attached to the chef, and beside it come rock shrimp salad, yellowtail jalapeño, white fish dry miso, salmon karashi su miso and sashimi salad. He opened his first restaurant in Peru, took on South American and European influences there, and later coined the term New Style Japanese cuisine for what came of it. Against that fixed repertoire the kitchen writes daily specials from Greek fish and seafood landed from the Aegean.
Twenty years at the Belvedere
In 2023 the restaurant marked its 20th anniversary at the Belvedere. That season ran from 27 April to 15 October, under Arman Naféei’s direction. Matsuhisa chefs from other kitchens came to cook through it, Nobu Matsuhisa among them.
The set piece was an omakase bar built in the open air on the hotel terrace, the first the restaurant had run, open for six nights from 27 June to 2 July 2023. Omakase leaves the choice of dishes to the chef.
The chef on the island
Nobu Matsuhisa comes back to Mykonos each year for the Nobu Food Festival. His pastime at the hotel is early morning swimming and yoga in his favourite Belvedere suite, and in the evenings he moves between the tables in the restaurant.
Who is this for
The Belvedere stands in the School of Fine Arts District, high in the Chora with the town spread out below it. Whitewashed buildings step down the slope around a courtyard garden of bougainvillea, inherited from the 19th-century villa and rare on an island where the Meltemi wind keeps planting low. Dinner suits anyone happy to give a warm night to one long sitting, and anyone who wants the evening sociable, with music pitched below the level of the island’s beach clubs.
