Orizon is the one restaurant at Gundari, the clifftop resort on the southern coast of Folegandros, in the Cyclades. The cooking is contemporary Greek, led by Cycladic seafood, with a list of local and international wines beside it. Many of its ingredients come from artisan farms on the island itself, which still work to traditional methods, and part of what the kitchen cooks is picked from an organic garden on the resort’s own ground.
The menu is Lefteris Lazarou’s. The house’s own a la carte dinner card, printed in Greek and in English, carries his name at the foot of both pages.
The chef whose name is on the card
Lazarou was born in Athens and grew up on the shore at Piraeus, and he is entirely self-taught. His father was a chef on cruise ships and took him into the kitchen at 13, and he has not left one since. Varoulko is his own restaurant, and Varoulko Seaside still runs under him, at Koumoundourou Coast 54 in Piraeus. He was 73 in September 2025. “I’ve never copied a dish from another chef,” he says, and he was the first to take the traditional Greek recipes and turn them around by cooking them with ingredients from the sea.
Why he took an island with no airport
Lazarou began working with Gundari’s founder, Ricardo Larriera, long before the hotel opened, so the two had time to understand each other. He took the work for the raw material. “For me, Folegandros represents traditional Greek culture, with raw ingredients that are very different from mass tourism destinations like Mykonos or Santorini,” he says.
He is drawn to the fish other kitchens pass over. Monkfish, he notes, has been ignored by many chefs because they go for a higher quality of fish and a certain status, and monkfish soup with spring textures is on the Orizon card among the main courses.
What the card holds
The dinner menu opens on a single soup: Aegean rockfish, scented with saffron. It reaches the table as kakavia, the lemony fisherman’s soup, with saffron, pieces of fish and warm bread beside it. Dinner is served on Orizon’s patio.
Among the appetisers is octopus carpaccio with fava bean cream, peppers, olives, capers and black garlic, and beside it a carpaccio of sea bass with citrus and cucumber sorbet. The salads include a Cycladic one of coloured cherry tomatoes, souroto, which is the soft local cheese, and carob rusks.
The bar, and the Japanese lineage behind it
Beside the restaurant is a vinyl-only hi-fi listening bar on the Japanese kissaten model, after the jazz listening cafés of an earlier era. Its cocktail list, alcoholic and non-alcoholic, was written by Line Athens, and the bar pours Greek and international wines.
The vinyl carries past the bar and into the bedrooms. Pioneer turntables stand in some of the rooms, and the Klipsch speakers there answer the record player in the lobby and the Pill and Giblin speakers beside it. That lobby player was still out of guests’ hands on 18 August 2026, and a listening room there was planned rather than open, so the bar holds the working one.
Where it sits in the complex
Block722 put the bar and restaurant together on the north-west side of the complex, drawn as the point where the house gathers. The room is meant for company as much as for dinner. At the pool a second bar runs swim-up, where the mixologists work from the water’s edge.
Who is this for
Orizon suits a traveller who wants the Aegean’s own fish at the centre of dinner, and who is content to eat in one place for a week. Breakfast is laid on the far side of the restaurant by the communal infinity pool: Greek yoghurt with honey and walnuts, kagianas, which is scrambled eggs, with bread from the island’s Italian bakery, and coffee drawn on a La Marzocco GB5. Dinner runs long, with kalasouna, the small crisp pies of spinach and mizithra cheese, and the fish of the day.
