Olympos Naoussa is open again. The dining room sits at Leoforos Nikis 5, Thessaloniki, 150 metres from Aristotelous Square, and for about three decades it was a name the city still used rather than a table anyone sat at. The kitchen now belongs to the executive chef Dimitris Tasioulas.
The name is older than the restaurant. The building opened as a tasting bar for the local Olympos beer and the Naoussa ice making factory, and the room first operated as a restaurant in 1927. German occupiers turned it into a cabaret and music hall during the Second World War. A new owner took the building after the war, and its rise as a culinary institution began in 1958. From then it fed the city’s professional and political class; the former prime ministers George Papandreou and Constantine Karamanlis were among the regulars. It closed in the mid-1990s with its local following intact.
Konstantinos Tornivoukas, of TOR Hotel Group, bought the property in 2017 with Grivalia Hospitality. TOR has traded since 1925 and lost its Mediterranee Hotel, on the same stretch of seafront, to the 1978 earthquake. The restaurant and a hotel came back as one project: the restored building below, a new extension on the top floors, and 60 rooms and suites at ON Residence.
What the listing decided
The drawings are by the Greek-Jewish architect Jacques Mosse, 1926. What the owners were later allowed to do with the room was decided by the Ministry of Culture, which declared the building a cultural heritage site, 1993.
The facade and the decorative elements were preserved to the Ministry’s own instructions, and those instructions set the method for the whole interior. The question at every stage was how much of the original material could be saved, restored and put back: the floor tiles, the crown mouldings and ceiling trim, the murals, the marble staircase, the cast iron railings, the wooden wall mouldings. Gaps were filled with exact replicas, faithfully reproduced with specialist help. A mural came to light during the work, and parts of the lobby walls were then painted by hand in the traditional way instead of papered over with a copy.
There was no transformation of the ceiling: its light green colour and its mouldings stayed, and the interior designer Fabienne Spahn said that helped a great deal in reaching the vintage style the project wanted. She worked with those colours rather than against them, carrying the green of the ceiling and the bold colours of the cement tiles into the fabrics and the decoration. The tiles themselves were restored and the missing parts copied. The stucco mouldings went past restoration: some were made for parts of the building where none had stood before, because the plan of the building had changed. Spahn described the renewal as a natural evolution of the original restaurant style, with art deco as a guideline rather than a style to copy.
What the kitchen serves
Tasioulas holds the title Chef Ambassador of Thessaloniki. He came to the kitchen by retrieving recipes and the memories attached to them, and setting both against what the city eats now. Thessaloniki’s own cooking is the centre of the menu, Greek and international dishes sit beside it, and Greek products are what the kitchen is built on.
Breakfast is built on cheeses from small traditional dairies and on dairy from the American Farm School in Thessaloniki, with handmade pies, sweets made from seasonal produce, and juices that are entirely natural. The à la carte reads the same way. Cod from Mount Athos comes with baby zucchini and a buttery sauce made from the fish’s own cheeks. Scorpionfish youvarlakia sit in a seafood avgolemono. Goat is served with flomari pasta from Lemnos and an ice cream of aged dry anthotyro, and the moussaka is braised beef cheeks and oxtail under a fluffy béchamel. Cheeses are named by where they come from: Manoura from Sifnos in the tomato salad, Arseniko from Naxos with the sautéed greens. The brewery has come back with the restaurant, so local beers sit on the list beside the wine, and there is a degustation menu for a longer evening.
Who is this for
Olympos Naoussa suits a reader who wants Thessaloniki’s own cooking at an address the city has known by that name since 1927. It is open all week. Breakfast runs from 7am to 11am, and the à la carte menu from 1pm until the last order at 11pm. The list moves from tapas and meze through to full dishes, so an hour at the table works as well as a whole evening. A private dining room at Tiger Loop, in the same building, looks out over the Thermaikos Gulf.
