Smoku opened in November 2025 on the pedestrian stretch of Thiseos, a short way off Syntagma, and with it Dimitris Katrivesis came back to Athens. What faces the street is an izakaya — a Japanese pub with a lit bar and a wood-fired grill behind it, drinks and small plates from 6pm until 2am, every day of the week. What the project is actually built around sits further in, through the room and out of sight: a tasting room of 20 seats, worked out with the Swedish chef Ebbe Vollmer, which opened in 2026.

The room at the back

The Tasting Room takes reservations only, and what it puts its name to is the tasting menu — laid for a whole table, or for a single guest sitting alone. Its premise is stated narrowly, which is the first good sign: fire, fermentation, raw cooking and Japanese craft, carried on Greek produce. Nothing in that sentence is decoration. It describes a kitchen that cooks over fire, cures and ferments its own store, serves a proportion of the menu uncooked, and buys its produce here rather than flying it in to prove a point.

The count is the point. A room of 20 is small enough to be cooked for rather than fed. A tasting menu at that scale is not a format; it is an argument about attention.

Two hands

Katrivesis studied cooking in Athens in 1996 and then left to learn it properly. He spent 2005 at elBulli under Ferran Adrià, trained in pastry at Le Nôtre in Paris, and worked at Dos Palillos in Barcelona and at Ryugin in Tokyo — the two kitchens that explain most of what he has done since. In 2013 he moved to London to finish his research into Nikkei cooking, and in 2014 he brought it to Athens, which had not seen it before. The years after took him to Tulum, to Paris and to Monte Carlo. Thiseos is the first Athenian address he has opened in years, and the city has noticed.

Vollmer left Sweden at 16 for London, cooked for the chefs he wanted to learn from, spent time in Singapore, and then went home to Malmö to found Vollmers with his brother — a dining room built on a philosophy of simplicity and on local, sustainable produce, which is easier to write than to hold to for a decade. His most recent room is EBBE — Chef’s Counter, in Tampa. The Tasting Room’s menu is the work of both men.

Thanos Vlachos stands beside Katrivesis in the kitchen. Panagiotis Fragos keeps the bar.

What the bar does first

For its first 60 days the front room worked as an izakaya alone, a deliberate rehearsal in public. The food read the way the Tasting Room’s premise reads, only louder: taramas with wasabi and tobiko, tuna belly in brine with tahini and pistachio, yakitori under a tare of volcanic ash, a mastiha tiramisu finished with matcha. The drinks did the same work — a Geisha Highball, a Mango Teriyaki, a dirty martini made with gin left to sit in oyster shells.

There is a Greek grammar running underneath all of it. Mastiha and yuzu are set beside one another; the taramas is a Greek dish given a Japanese accent rather than the reverse. This is not fusion in the tired sense. It is a chef who learned his craft in Barcelona and Tokyo, cooking the produce of the country he came home to.

The arcade

The address carries its own history. For 13 years the arcade on Thiseos held Drunk Sinatra, among the best-known bars in Athens, and for a long stretch the most crowded. Taking that room and turning it into a grill room with a tasting room behind it is a considered piece of nerve. The arcade’s shape does much of the work: a public front, a quiet passage, a room that has to be reached.

Why it matters

Athens has had good Japanese cooking for a decade, much of it introduced by Katrivesis himself. What it has had less of is a room of 20 seats where the tasting menu is the whole proposition and two chefs of this pedigree stand behind it together. That is a different order of intent, and it is not the kind that fades once the opening is over.

For a guest who has taken the measure of every table in Kolonaki, the reason to walk down Thiseos is precise: a door at the back of a bar, and a menu cooked over fire for 20 people at a time.

The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.