At Pelagos a guest is handed a deck of cards, picks one ingredient from it, and eats that ingredient three to five ways. The dining room is Luca Piscazzi’s, in the Arion Building, Four Seasons Astir Palace Hotel Athens, Apollonos 40, Vouliagmeni, on the peninsula at the head of the Athens Riviera. Pelagos takes its name from the Greek word for ocean, and it sits on an upper floor of one of the hotel’s mid-century buildings, looking over the Saronic Gulf. Its own description of the interiors is an opulent cruise ship, with tables outside in nooks above the coast.
Pelagos served its first guests on 13 May 2021. One Michelin star, awarded 19 November 2021, followed six months later, and the restaurant was the first starred kitchen south of Athens. Piscazzi learned of it on Twitter. There was no ceremony and no jackets, and he put the star down to the work of the kitchen team and of the service team led by the restaurant manager Cedric Vinckier.
In May 2026 Piscazzi rebuilt the carte around single ingredients in place of courses. Each product has its own card, the cards come to the table as a deck, and the one a guest chooses comes back as a set of preparations.
One ingredient, three to five ways
The carte carries four cards. Black angus beef from the island of Naxos and line-caught dentex are EUR 120 each, tomato EUR 95, langoustine EUR 140. Under the beef the kitchen sends a tartare with white courgette and bone marrow, a beef bacon croquette with cauliflower, a dry-aged and glazed cut with black garlic and dashi beurre blanc, and a tagliatelle alla bolognese of beef and pineapple XO. The dentex comes as sashimi, as an “Insalata Di Pesce” with pani buri, kumquat and bottarga, poached and grilled, and in a caciucco with saffron. Tomato runs to three preparations and langoustine to five, which is where the foie gras ice cream sits.
Three dishes stand outside the cards under a signature heading, and four desserts close the carte. The first of the three is caviar pasta, cold Setaro spaghetti, clams, almond, EUR 55, which Piscazzi wrote for the opening menu and has kept on ever since; a courgette tagliatelle and a pan-fried sole with padron pepper, champagne and raspberries sit beside it. The tasting menu is EUR 155 per person, and both the tagliatelle and the sole appear in it; pairings at EUR 110 and EUR 240 are offered as Corals of Pelagos and A String of Pearls. Dinner is Tuesday to Saturday, 7pm to 10pm, and the room takes children aged twelve and over.
What the islands sent back
Pelagos on Tour was a week-long sourcing expedition, run three summers in a row, and each trip became that same summer’s menu. The first went to Tinos, Lesvos and Kalymnos in 2022, where Piscazzi found kariki, a cheese matured inside pumpkins, and swordfish roe. Crete followed for 2023, with escargots, graviera and olive oil. The third and last was summer 2024: Sifnos, for chickpeas baked overnight in a clay tzouka, capers and sage; Santorini, for cherry tomatoes and white aubergines grown on volcanic soil; and Naxos, which is where the beef comes from. Piscazzi has said the travelling was partly a way of settling what the restaurant was, Mediterranean or a seafood restaurant.
The room was first conceived as an Asian one, and the delay to its opening is what turned it Greek: with time in hand, the team narrowed the menu onto local products, and Piscazzi started on ingredients he had never cooked with. Mastic was one of them. “We melt it like a caramel, or we dry age fish inside this crust of mastic resin,” he says. Getting the ageing right took him repeated attempts.
The chef
Piscazzi grew up in Rome and left for London at 19. He was head chef at Anne-Sophie Pic’s La Dame de Pic in London for four years. Pic herself came in once or twice a year, so he cooked her dishes in his own way, and he left because he wanted to cook entirely for himself. Pelagos is his first kitchen of his own. Asked for three words for his cooking, he gives “Simple, Straight-forward, Tasty”, and what he is after is the flavour, aroma and texture of a raw seasonal ingredient, on a plate where a diner can still tell what it is. He says of the room: “we seek to contribute to Greece’s evolution as a world-class dining destination with the highest standards of service”.
Who is this for
Pelagos suits a diner happy to give a whole dinner to a single ingredient, and to make that dinner the fixed point of a day on the coast. The cooking is Mediterranean, with Italian and French turns in it, and it rewards curiosity about one product. The terrace is the seat to ask for in warm weather. The room is wheelchair accessible, has a car park and takes no pets.
