Pino by Luca Piscazzi opened on 10 May 2026, the day Vione Paros unlocked its doors on a second season. It is the first table to carry the Roman chef’s own name outside Athens, set into the hillside at Ambelas near Naoussa, inside a hotel of 40 sea-view suites — 28 of them with private pools — that received its first guests in the summer of 2025.
The chef
Piscazzi was born in Rome and learned to cook beside his grandmother, an origin he has never much revised. He came up through Apsleys at the Lanesborough in London and La Pergola in Rome, through Amber in Hong Kong and a spell at El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, before taking the head chef’s post at La Dame de Pic, Anne-Sophie Pic’s dining room at Ten Trinity Square. He has led Pelagos at the Four Seasons Astir Palace in Athens since that relaunched dining room opened in May 2021.
The name is not new. Pino — the nickname he was given as a boy in Rome — first went up over a Roman trattoria he opened with his wife, Charlotte Luykx, in Glyfada in 2025. Ambelas is the second table to carry it, and the first beyond Athens.
The table
The cooking reads Rome through Parian water. The concept, as the hotel sets it out, draws on Roman and coastal Italian traditions, reinterpreted with a contemporary sensibility and a strong connection to place — which in practice means the day is built in two registers.
Lunch is the convivial one: thin Roman-style pizzas, handmade pastas, seasonal plates meant to be shared and picked over without hurry. Dinner narrows and quietens, turning on fish and shellfish landed locally, seasonal produce from the island and aromatic herbs, with a list of Italian wines and a short register of cocktails behind it. Service is unhurried by design at both hours.
Piscazzi’s own account of the method is plain enough. Good cooking, he says, begins with simplicity, high-quality raw ingredients and bold flavour — a sentence that sounds modest until one considers how much of it depends on the morning’s catch and on a kitchen willing to rewrite the evening around it.
Above Ambelas
Ambelas lies on the coast a short way from Naoussa, and Vione is built into the hillside above it, every suite turned to the sea. The hotel opened in the summer of 2025 and passed into the management of SWOT Hospitality, the group founded by Giorgos Konstantinidis, in April 2026. It welcomes guests aged 14 and over — a threshold that does much of the work an adults-only policy would, without announcing itself.
Its Dione Spa runs to 800 m²: a heated indoor pool, hammam, sauna, jacuzzi, rooms for rest and a fitness studio, among the largest wellness facilities on Paros. The architecture is Cycladic in the restrained sense — natural materials, a palette of warm, earthy tones, rooms that open onto terraces and terraces that open onto the water.
What it changes
The arrangement is the part worth noting. Piscazzi is not a visiting name appearing for three nights of four hands and a photograph. Pino is his own restaurant, and it stands at Ambelas for the length of a season that runs to October. That is a different order of commitment, and it is the kind that shows on the plate in September as surely as in May.
An Italian kitchen at Ambelas — close to Naoussa yet off the harbour entirely, run by a chef who keeps two dining rooms in Athens the rest of the year — is a proposition of its own. For a guest who has already spent an evening on every quay in the Cyclades, it is a reason to take the road east.
The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.
