Onuki opened at THE ILISIAN on 10 December 2025 — the first restaurant to be laid out at the Athenian address that opened as the Hilton Athens on 23 April 1963 and is being remade as THE ILISIAN, whose hotel opened as the Conrad Athens The Ilisian on 23 April 2026, to the day. The Japanese room that made its name at Costa Navarino now stands beside the pool in Ilisia, under its chef and co-owner Stamatis Skriapas, in interiors, lighting and styling drawn by Yabu Pushelberg for Temes.
The room
Yabu Pushelberg’s own account of the brief is unusually plain. The client wanted an Athens outpost for Onuki that stayed true to Japanese craft and seasonality while feeling distinctly Athenian, and that moved without interruption from the open kitchen to the terrace, with an upper level able to shift between gathering and privacy. The studio calls what it built Japanese calm, Athenian charge, and the plan reads less as a room than as a sequence: arrival, then the bar, then the open air, then the quieter floor above.
Colour carries the argument. Warm persimmon tones gather at the bar and draw the eye upstairs; indigo runs out onto the terrace; sculpted lighting in Aegean blue hangs above it. Shoji-inspired panels, translucent and movable, divide the alcoves on the upper level, and a sushi bar anchors one side of the terrace below. Two Athens artists are in the room — a large-scale painting by Sofia Stevi on the terrace, and work by Katerina Charou written into the panels that make the dividers.
Behind all of it sits kizuna: in the studio’s words, the enduring bond between chef and guest, season and plate, tradition and the present moment. It is the kind of organising idea that ordinarily survives only as far as the press release. Here it decides the plan. The kitchen is not screened from the terrace, and the floor above can close in on itself without losing the room beneath.
The kitchen
Skriapas cooks Japan by region rather than by canon — umami-led, led by the season, the familiar recipes revisited rather than restaged, with the traditional methods kept intact. The sushi bar runs to some 20 kinds of fish on a given day, Hokkaido scallops among them, alongside prawns, the fish of the day and a short register of meat. The fruit and vegetables come from Japan; the chef has chosen small Greek producers besides. The list behind it is Japanese and particular: rare whiskies, small-batch shōchū and handcrafted saké, with cocktails turning on yuzu, shiso and seasonal blossom.
The manners were learned in the Peloponnese. Onuki began at Costa Navarino, in The Romanos, a Luxury Collection Resort. An Athens room was the harder proposition — a resort restaurant is judged against a holiday, a city restaurant against every other table its guests could have chosen that evening.
Ilisia
The address is much of the point. Onuki stands in Ilisia, on the block that opened as the Hilton Athens and for two generations was the city’s default answer to where an arriving guest should stay. Its remaking is the most consequential thing to happen to Athenian hospitality in a decade, and the order in which the parts arrive tells its own story: not the hotel first, but the restaurant.
That is a deliberate reading of the city. Athens eats out with a seriousness that surprises visitors who came for the Acropolis, and a dining room that fills on its own account — not on the strength of the guests sleeping upstairs — is the surer foundation for what follows.
What it changes
For a client who knows Costa Navarino, Onuki in Ilisia removes a long drive south from a very good evening. For one who does not, it is a rare thing in Athens: a Japanese room conceived at the scale and finish of an international project, with a chef who owns part of it and is therefore in it, and interiors by a studio with a long practice of knowing when to stop.
It is also an early sighting of what the whole address intends to be. The room beside the pool opened ahead of the hotel, in December 2025, in a city where December is nobody’s season. Anything that works on those terms will not need the summer.
The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.
