Ocean is a restaurant at Daios Cove, the resort built above a secluded bay at Vathi, 72100 Agios Nikolaos, Crete. Its kitchen mandate is DUCASSE Conseil, held since 2019, and the consultancy has come back to the cove ever since to rewrite what the room serves. The cooking is Mediterranean, drawn from the Greek sea and land.
DUCASSE Conseil is the consulting arm of Ducasse Paris, based at Issy-les-Moulineaux. Its brief at the cove was to create a new culinary identity for Ocean, and it ran well past the carte: the menu, the layout of the kitchen and the choice of tableware were all inside it. The kitchen and front-of-house staff were trained before the grand opening, and the consultancy’s people stayed on through the soft openings and the opening itself.
What the mandate covers
The arrangement is breakfast, lunch and dinner rewritten twice a year, so the first service of the day changes with the carte. Between those rewrites the same people run quality follow-up during visits to the cove, assessing the kitchen and holding it to a consistent standard. The resort later asked for the same attention at Pangea, its buffet room, where the chefs cook meat and fish over a natural wood fire in an open grill corner at breakfast and dinner.
The room
Ocean and the beach bar below it were drawn by d-raw, London, with The Ghost Group and Apk Architects, Athens, as a phase of the resort’s redesign, and the room was set to open in the spring of 2021. One wall of the kitchen was left open, so the pass and the cooks working it are in view from the tables. Beside it, in a space reconfigured for the purpose, the same team introduced the Culinary School, and The Ghost Group and d-raw treated that room to match the rest of the resort.
At the table
The dishes are the DUCASSE Conseil team’s, drawn from the Greek sea and land and built on seasonal, sustainable produce. Lefteris Gryparis is the chef at Ocean, a Mediterranean specialist of more than ten years. Service runs three times a day, 07.30 to 10.30, 12.00 to 16.30, 18.30 to 22.30, so breakfast, a long lunch and dinner all happen in the same room. The wine list is kept by the resort’s own sommelier, and the bar carries cocktails by The Clumsies, Athens. The resort reads its own table through where Crete sits: at the crossroads of three continents, surrounded by four seas and worked on by several civilisations.
The school beside it
The Culinary School is a plain, modern space with current equipment in it, and books and products from the resort’s chosen partners are set out to look through. A guest can take a private dinner there with the chef, a tasting poured by a winery and a sommelier, or a tea masterclass.
The chefs who come in
The arrangement also brings two chefs from Maison DUCASSE Paris each year to cook at Ocean, in annual events the consultancy helps organise. Separately, the resort runs a programme called Culinary Journeys, which brings visiting chefs from Greece and abroad to cook at the cove. Its published roster names Joan Roca, Ángel León, Kei Kobayashi and Nicolai Nørregaard, alongside Greek cooks including Alex Tsiotinis and Grigoris Marinakis.
Who is this for
Anyone who wants a resort dining room with a consultancy’s hand still on it, and who is staying long enough to eat there more than once. Daios Cove runs over 25 hectares, built around a natural amphitheatre in village-like parts, after a Cretan hamlet, and a glass funicular carries guests through the gardens between the beach, the restaurants and their rooms. Ocean’s terrace is cocooned in raw timber and bamboo blinds, so it stays usable in high winds, and the room inside is bold colour against the blue outside.
