Parostià stands at Naoussa, Paros, on the beach at Cosme, a Luxury Collection Resort, Empiria Group’s house on the north coast of the island. It takes its name from the parostià, the stone oven of a traditional Parian house, and the sharing list reads the way the name suggests: every dish on it is grilled over charcoal.
Three named rooms divide the day between them. Volta serves breakfast at the heart of the resort. Vrosi cooks traditional Greek recipes at a wood-fired oven in an open-air garden. Parostià has the shore, from the middle of the day onwards. The room keeps two services. Lunch 13:00 to 18:00, dinner 19:30 to 23:30.
The kitchen belongs to Yiannis Kioroglou, who leads the cooking at Cosme and arrived from La Petite Maison in Cannes and La Guerite in Saint Barth. Parostià sits in his own register of restaurants beside both of them. He cooks at Parōn as well, the restaurant at Parīlio on Paros, and at Lure and Charisma on Santorini.
What the Josper oven cooks
The sharing section of the dinner menu carries one line above all of it: every dish there is grilled in a Josper charcoal oven. That line covers a whole grilled lobster, half a chicken or a whole one on a lemon marinade, and a catch of the day either grilled or finished in a salt crust. The beef is Spanish Angus, as a côte de bœuf and a T-bone, with a US black Angus tomahawk and a wagyu ribeye beside them. The côte de bœuf, the T-bone and the tomahawk are sold by the kilogram, so a table orders a piece and divides it, while the wagyu ribeye comes at 300 or 400 grams. Caviar comes in servings of 10 grams, with shallots, crème fraîche and chives. Béarnaise and pepper are the two sauces, and the sides are fries with rosemary salt, broccolini and mesclun.
Where the food comes from
A note at the foot of the menu says where the kitchen buys. The olive oil is organic and collected in Epidaurus, in the Peloponnese. The vegetables are organic and grown locally. Sourced from the Cyclades, the fish reach the table as the catch of the day, as a ladero with green beans, potato and tomato sauce, or as a sole meunière with butter sauce, capers and parsley. Two cheeses carry their island onto the menu: touloumi from Paros in a grilled French lettuce salad with pistachio and fresh onion, graviera from Naxos in a chopped salad of cabbage, frisée lettuce, avocado and orange. The lettuce salad is one of the two dishes the menu marks as a signature. The other is the fisherman’s pasta, bucatini with the catch of the day, chilli, parsley, lemon and basil.
An old Parian recipe, reworked
Gouna is an old Parian recipe with mackerel, and Kioroglou has reworked it for Parostià with aubergine purée, melon and pickled celery. The raw list runs to four dishes: sea bream carpaccio under a yuzu and truffle dressing, red mullet sashimi with lavender and marjoram, sea bass tartare with a fricassée dressing and a crispy beef carpaccio with tonnato sauce, coffee and nasturtium. The starters run to taramas with bottarga, grilled calamari with herb pesto and isot pepper, octopus with capers, olives and oregano and cauliflower tempura. Away from the charcoal the main dishes are a lamb ossobuco with chickpeas and lemon, a sautéed beef fillet with allumette potatoes, porcini rigatoni with cream and parmesan and a lobster pasta for two, linguine with fresh tomato and lemongrass.
Who is this for
Parostià suits a long lunch more than a quick one, and a table happy to order one dish and divide it. It suits a day on Cosme’s beach too: the room sits open to the air on the sand, the Aegean a few steps from it, and nothing about it asks you to change out of what you swam in. Cosme calls the room joyful, and the cooking it describes reaches across Paros, Greece and the Mediterranean.
