Smoku opened in November 2025 on the pedestrian stretch of Thiseos, off Syntagma, Athens, a short walk from the city’s central square. With it, the chef Dimitris Katrivesis came back to Athens. Facing the street is an izakaya, a Japanese pub, with a lit bar and a wood-fired grill behind it. It serves drinks and small plates from 6pm until 2am, every day of the week. The project is built around a room further in, out of sight: a Tasting Room of 20 seats, opened 2026 and worked out with the Swedish chef Ebbe Vollmer.
The room at the back
The Tasting Room takes reservations only. It serves a tasting menu, laid for a whole table or for a single guest dining alone. Its premise is stated narrowly, which is the first good sign: fire, fermentation, raw cooking and Japanese craft, applied to Greek produce. Each part of that means something. The kitchen cooks over fire, cures and ferments its own stores, serves part of the menu raw, and buys its produce in Greece without flying it in to prove a point.
The number of seats is what matters most. A room of 20 is small enough for every guest to be cooked for with care. At that size, a tasting menu is a statement about attention.
Two chefs
Katrivesis studied cooking in Athens in 1996 and then left to learn more. 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. Those last two kitchens explain most of what he has done since. In 2013 he moved to London to finish his research into Nikkei cooking, the Japanese cooking of Peru, and in 2014 he brought it to Athens, which had not seen it before. The years after took him to Tulum, Paris and Monte Carlo. Thiseos is the first address he has opened in Athens in years, and the city has noticed.
Vollmer left Sweden at 16 for London and cooked for the chefs he wanted to learn from. After time in Singapore, he went home to Malmö and founded Vollmers with his brother. Its philosophy rests on simplicity and on local, sustainable produce, which is easier to write down than to hold to for a decade. His most recent restaurant is EBBE: Chef’s Counter, in Tampa.
The Tasting Room’s menu is the work of Dimitris Katrivesis with Ebbe Vollmer. Thanos Vlachos works beside Katrivesis in the kitchen, and Panagiotis Fragos runs the bar.
The bar came first
For its first 60 days the front room worked as an izakaya alone, a deliberate rehearsal in public. The food followed the Tasting Room’s premise, only louder. There was taramas, a Greek dip of cured fish roe, with wasabi and tobiko, which is flying-fish roe. There was tuna belly in brine with tahini and pistachio, and yakitori, grilled skewers, under a glaze of volcanic ash. Dessert was a tiramisu made with mastiha, a resin from the Greek island of Chios, and finished with matcha. The drinks followed the same idea: a Geisha Highball, a Mango Teriyaki, and a dirty martini made with gin left to sit in oyster shells.
The base of all of it is Greek. Mastiha and yuzu sit side by side, and the taramas is a Greek dish with a Japanese accent, not the other way round. This 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 has its own history. For 13 years the arcade on Thiseos held Drunk Sinatra, among the best-known bars in Athens and for a long time the most crowded. Turning that room into a grill with a tasting room behind it took some nerve. The shape of the arcade helps: a public front, a quiet passage, and a room that has to be reached.
A tasting room for Athens
Athens has had good Japanese cooking for a decade, much of it introduced by Katrivesis himself. It has had fewer rooms of 20 seats where the tasting menu is the whole offer and two chefs of this experience stand behind it together. That is a more serious intent, and not the kind that fades once the opening is over.
Who is this for
Smoku suits food lovers who want a long, focused dinner, and friends who want a lively night at a bar. The bar takes walk-ins only and pours highballs, fermented cocktails and Japanese whiskies, some mixed with rosemary and smoked citrus. The Tasting Room has a marble counter with low stools, set against palm-print wallpaper and a gilt mirror, with shelves of glassware lit red and blue. Its menu draws on koji, a mould used in Japanese fermentation, and on kombujime, fish cured between sheets of kelp.
