Matsuhisa Paros is Nobu Matsuhisa’s room on the island, laid out in a Mediterranean garden by the sea at Avant Mar on Piperi Beach, a five-minute walk from Naoussa. It opened in 2023, and the hotel says it brought Nobu-style cooking to the island for the first time. The dining room has an open kitchen and a sushi bar, the garden puts tables outside with the Aegean in front of them, and the cooking is Japanese with Peruvian influences, the style Matsuhisa made his own.
Dress is smart casual. Tables are by reservation, taken online, by telephone or by email. The posted hours are 7pm to 1am, and the restaurant’s own answer to the same question gives 7.30pm to midnight. In season the resident DJ, George Varvounis, plays on Tuesday evenings from 7pm to 11pm.
Matsuhisa Paros runs from mid-June to mid-September, and the room closes with the island’s summer. The restaurant gives 4 June 2027 as the date it will open again.
The third room in Greece
Paros is the third Matsuhisa in Greece. The first was at the Belvedere Hotel in Mykonos, in the School of Fine Arts district, which was also Matsuhisa’s first room in Europe and which still opens for the summer season. Athens followed in 2008, at Astir Palace in Vouliagmeni, where the doors open daily from 7pm to midnight. Asked in 2024 why he had come back to Greece a third time, Matsuhisa said the Paros project began with “a very good proposal from a great partner in a beautiful hotel”, and that the team in Greece counted for as much: a new generation of staff coming up, whom he wanted to give another kitchen to work in. He is attached to Mykonos because it was the first, he said, and he puts Paros as the island Mykonos was 15 years ago.
To mark the opening he broke the lid of a round sake barrel himself. Japanese tradition keeps that ceremony for a new restaurant, and his houses repeat it wherever they open.
What the kitchen cooks
The style began in Peru. Matsuhisa opened his first restaurant there in 1972, put Japanese technique to Peruvian flavours, and took the result to Beverly Hills, where the first Matsuhisa opened in 1987 and the Nobu restaurants followed. Paros is built on the same ground: sushi, the chef’s new-style sashimi, hot dishes and black cod miso, which has been served long enough to count as a classic. The house names three plates as its signatures, the cod among them, with yellowtail jalapeño and rock shrimp beside it.
Matsuhisa draws the line between his two names himself. Nobu is his first name and Matsuhisa his last; the concept in both is the same, the partnership behind each differs, and a Matsuhisa room is in some places the smaller of the two, with the same menu.
The house around it
Avant Mar opened in July 2023, designed by Tense Architecture Network for Grivalia Hospitality on the shore at Piperi Beach. The main house has 38 rooms and suites, seven of them with private plunge pools, and a 55-metre pool runs through the middle of the hotel and reads as continuous with the sea behind it. Five Infinity Suites stand 200 metres along the shore, built to feel suspended above the Aegean. Matsuhisa is one of several rooms here: there is an all-day restaurant, Thymes, a patisserie called Figs and a gin and tonic bar, The Bridge. Naoussa and its harbour are five minutes away on foot.
Who is this for
This suits a traveller who wants one evening on Paros given over to a single kitchen, and who likes to begin with a drink rather than go straight to the table: the bar mixes its own cocktails and keeps a wine list beside them. It suits a group as much as a pair, since the house takes private dinners and occasions, a birthday or an anniversary among them, and will cook around a dietary need when it is told in advance.
