Oliviera is the Greek room at Mandarin Oriental, Costa Navarino, standing at the heart of the resort on the hillside above Navarino Bay, in Pylos, Messenia. The house describes what the kitchen does as Greek cuisine redefined with contemporary touches, looking out over the bay. What makes the room worth the drive into the Peloponnese is narrower than that. Almost everything that reaches the plate was grown, caught or made in the Messenian region, and the kitchen will not cook what Messenia cannot supply.
The cooking is Bertrand Valegeas’s. He is French, and he brings more than 25 years of international kitchens to the post. His brief covers all seven dining rooms at the resort rather than Oliviera alone, and the others run French, Levantine and Italian kitchens alongside the beach club. Oliviera is the Greek one, and it is the room the hotel uses to say where it stands.
The garden at the gate
The first thing a guest sees on arriving at the resort is the chef’s garden. It grows around 15 varieties of tomato, fine zucchini and a wide range of herbs, and Valegeas takes guests into it to harvest with him, so they can tell one mint or basil from another. “Real luxury is a zucchini flower that never sees the fridge,” he says. It is picked, cooked and eaten within the hour, still fluffy, with the right colour and texture.
What the garden does not grow comes from Messenian farmers and fishermen the kitchen buys from directly. The fisherman brings the day’s catch to the resort’s jetty. The cheesemaker arrives with feta, sfela and graviera, and will take the chef into the cave where the wheels are aged, so that a particular wheel can be matched to a particular dish.
What the kitchen will not cook
The garden sets a limit as well as a supply. “We only serve what’s local and in season,” Valegeas says, and he holds the rule against his own tastes. He loves Mexican food and Indian food and will attempt neither, because he has neither the ingredients nor the people to do them justice. Ask him for mango and he will send you to the tropics. What Messenia gives him instead is watermelon, apricots and peaches.
The other rooms work only because their ingredients sit close to the Messenian ones. At the pizza bar the flour is the single import, from a small farm in Italy, and everything else comes from the garden, a nearby farm and local producers. The Levantine kitchen leans on the right spices and on a Syrian chef rather than on imported produce.
Breakfast on a tray
Breakfast at Oliviera is laid as paramana rather than as a buffet, from a selection that changes daily. Paramana is the taverna practice of bringing a large tray of dishes to the table for the table to choose from, and at breakfast there are two trays, one savoury and one sweet. Valegeas adopted it because a buffet generates food waste.
The same thinking runs through the kitchen. Vegetable trimmings are dried, ground to a powder and used on the burger buns in place of sesame seeds, and what comes back on a plate goes to the compost that feeds the garden.
The room that travels
Oliviera has been sent abroad as well. Oliviera Unveiled is a travelling series that carries the restaurant into other Mandarin Oriental hotels. It opened at the Palm Court of Mandarin Oriental Ritz, Madrid, from 29 January to 2 February 2025. Miami followed, for three weeks, and the series finished in Paris. Valegeas took over the kitchen of each host hotel in turn.
He describes the series as discovery running in both directions. The team goes to show people what Greek food is really about, and comes home with what it found: Miami was a first visit, and it brought back Cuban and Peruvian cooking. “It would be a shame if it were a one-sided journey,” he says, “where we only share what we know and don’t take lessons home with us.”
The hotel around it
Mandarin Oriental, Costa Navarino has 99 keys, 51 suites and 48 villas, set into the hillside of Navarino Bay. Oliviera serves breakfast every day, and dinner from Friday to Tuesday.
Who is this for
Oliviera suits a traveller who wants one kitchen to answer for a whole stay, and who would rather eat what Messenia grew that week than work down a long card. This is a quiet corner of the Peloponnese, a long way in feel from Mykonos, and the resort sets out to show a guest what philoxenia means, the Greek duty of welcome owed to a visitor. The lounge nearby looks west over Messenia at sunset, and a brasserie on the property overlooks the golf greens.
