On 18 December 2025 the principal restaurant of the Aigli pavilion, standing in the Zappeion Garden at the edge of Athens, opened its doors as Zappa. For the first time in the venue’s history the room carries a name of its own. It is now an all-day fine-dining restaurant and bar in the hands of Chrysanthos Karamolegos, a chef of nearly 40 years in professional kitchens, who has come back to the centre of Athens after some 15 years of work elsewhere in Greece and abroad.
The pavilion in the garden
Aigli poured its first coffee in 1904, in the National Garden beside the neoclassical Zappeion hall, and the outlook it commands — over the garden, towards the sacred rock of the Acropolis — made it a meeting place for the intellectuals, artists and innovators of the city almost at once. Its open-air cinema — the oldest in Athens still working, and a preserved monument since the 1990s — runs from May through October, an evening at a time beneath the trees. Few addresses in Athens have been continuously in company for so long.
The pavilion came through a full renovation in 2025, with architecture and interiors by Neiheiser Argyros with Esé studio across some 3,200 square metres of interior. The architects call the approach ornamental minimalism: the classical detail of the building acknowledged and then pared back, the marble and the woodwork left to speak quietly, the once inward-looking rooms opened to the garden with new terraces and lines of sight. Zappa is one of five rooms the complex now holds, alongside the ballroom, the upstairs event floor, the yard and the cinema.
Inside, the dining room is set in wood the colour of chocolate under warm, carefully placed light, its tables dressed in double cloths, its windows giving onto the garden — a view that is at its best after dark. A semicircular bar of low, broad wood curves around the open kitchen, so the cooking is in plain sight of anyone who chooses to sit at it.
The chef
Karamolegos was born in Athens and carries Santorini in the family line. His name was made first in the capital, at the emblematic Aristera Dexia in Rouf, and then along the Peloponnesian and Macedonian coasts: he held the seafront room at Barbouni, at Costa Navarino, and went on to stand as chef patron over three of the resort’s tables — Tomata, the Kafenio & Deli and the Souvlakerie. At Sani Resort in Halkidiki, his Tomata was for years a point of reference. Before returning to Athens he cooked at Anama, in Gialova.
That itinerary explains the register of the food. The base is Greek and openly so, built on herbs and on sauces made to his own hand, with the Eastern and North African seasoning of a cook who has read widely and travelled further. The kitchen keeps three registers through the day: coffee and sandwiches in the morning, then cooked dishes at lunch and again at dinner.
Read the menu and the argument becomes concrete. Scallop carpaccio arrives with sea urchin, quince and seaweed. Shrimp and king crab come with artichokes and chermoula. Pork is cooked slowly and finished with avgolemono, the most domestic sauce in the Greek repertoire, and set beside chimichurri. Dessert is a tarte tatin of apple with bay-leaf ice cream. He is joined in the project by Viktoras Kouroupis, Denisa Varcholova, and Georgia Papaioannou, who has worked beside him for years.
The bar and the cellar
The cocktail list is the work of Thodoris Pyrillos, whose standing rests on the classics rather than on invention for its own sake — a quiet choice, and in a city of restless bar rooms a confident one. The wine list runs Greek labels beside international ones, chosen rather than assembled.
What it changes
Athens has never been short of good tables. What it has rarely had is a serious kitchen installed inside one of its own landmarks, on a site the whole city already knows by heart. That is the interesting part of this opening: not a new address, but an old one asked to hold a standard it has not been asked to hold before.
Taking a name is the measure of the intent. A restaurant known only by the building it occupies is a room in a monument; one that takes a name of its own is asking to be judged on the plate. Zappa sits in the garden, with the sacred rock in the view and the Zappeion hall alongside it, and has chosen the harder standard.
For those who would take the measure of this kitchen, the introduction is ours to make.
