Zolotas Beach: This Summer’s Most Delightful Surprise at Four Seasons Athens

I thought I knew what to expect from Four Seasons Athens and its culinary dream team, led by the relentlessly energetic, highly accomplished and, as it turns out, decidedly bold Apostolos Dimou. But Zolotas Beach genuinely caught me by surprise. Suddenly, on a beach that carries an entire, distinctly glamorous chapter of Athens’ collective summer memory, there is what the team itself describes as a pop-up restaurant that feels both new and strangely familiar, as though it had simply disappeared from the picture for years and someone had finally remembered to put it back where it belonged.

And this, for me, is where the first real achievement of the project lies. At a hotel such as Four Seasons Astir Palace Hotel Athens, with so many guests, so many different culinary concepts and an operation busy enough to fill five resorts, adding yet another restaurant is only easy on paper. The difficult part is giving it a genuine reason to exist and a personality of its own.

Riana Kounou of Riana in Berlin plays a decisive role in making that happen. She knew this beach long before it ever became a project, and her own memories of the old Astir became something like an unspoken brief. She dressed the space with such natural ease that it feels as though she simply laid a towel over an old summer memory and gave it form again. Creating that sense that a place has somehow always been there is usually the hardest thing of all, particularly when almost everything has, in reality, been built anew.

And this is where Apostolos Dimou’s achievement with Zolotas Beach becomes even clearer. He brought together, under the same summer umbrella, people with very different backgrounds, references and aesthetics, and somehow made them seem as though they had been waiting for exactly this encounter. That eclectic mix of personalities is a large part of the restaurant’s charm, and says a great deal about the instinct with which the whole concept was put together.

In the kitchen, Thodoris Papanikolaou returns to Athens after an absence of around five years. From Selene in Santorini, where he had already shown just how painterly his cooking could be, to Sense at AthensWas and Parla in Kifissia, his career has always carried a strongly personal signature and an artistic streak that is difficult to miss.

At Zolotas, though, he finds a different canvas, and I think it suits him perfectly. Here, the palette becomes brighter, redolent of Greece and the sea, and leads him towards flavours that are more comforting, more immediately appetising, with sheer pleasure often taking the lead. Some dishes draw on familiarity, while others leave more room for playfulness and his creative instinct.

I am also glad that all of this is expressed à la carte, because that freedom feels far more appropriate to a setting like this. Then you look at the improvised open kitchen, the parrilla, the compact pass and the Monolith, and realise just how much work sits behind this seemingly effortless picture.

The bread, however, puts Greece on the table from the very first bite: warm flatbread, vibrant sprigs of wild oregano, excellent tarama, a fantastic Mediterranean-style chimichurri and a particularly clever butter infused with the flavours of tzatziki. With the N-Tacos, dakos is given the kind of makeover Papanikolaou clearly enjoys. Fresh mizithra is disguised as a vivid red tomato, while alongside it a carob taco is filled with Greek salad sorbet, with delicious cherry tomatoes and capers scattered around the plate.

There is a real sense of humour to this dish.

The beef tartare is the best I have eaten in Athens this year, and that more or less settles the matter. Rich and succulent, with caviar that certainly has a reason to be there, though the dish would lose nothing without it, cured egg yolk and deliberately salty potato chips, it is one of those plates that reminds you just how pleasurable a lack of restraint can sometimes be. With the cured amberjack, the jalapeño sorbet brings a lively heat that suits the fish beautifully, although personally I have never been particularly fond of sorbets appearing before dessert. I would rather linger on the wild greens. They were superb, deeply flavourful and possessed of that compelling quality great greens can have when they suddenly decide to steal the dish from its supposed star.

The carabinero prawns in the prawn pasta are beautifully cooked, their flesh sweet, succulent and full of the sea. The real indulgence, though, is hidden in the heads, where all those concentrated, almost intoxicating juices collect. This is food that calls for fingers, slurping and a temporary suspension of table manners. Half the pleasure is right there. My favourite dish at Zolotas Beach, however, is the lamb kontosouvli, because this is where Papanikolaou allows pleasure to take complete control. Succulent lamb, smoked tirokafteri, pita and grilled vegetables come together in a dish that is deeply Greek, generous and just sinful enough to make you forget entirely that you are supposed to be taking notes.

Michalis Chatzikalimeris’s desserts have, as always, real class. And although for years I have been more than willing to wage a personal campaign for the disappearance of crémeux from restaurant menus, his chocolate crémeux with burnt vanilla and espresso earns an emphatic reprieve. If I had to choose just one dessert, however, I would go without hesitation for the succulent rotisserie pineapple with ravani, mascarpone and coconut ice cream. For that, he deserves to be applauded twice over.

Zolotas Beach may have begun as a summer interlude, but before the season was even over it had already become a proper chapter in the story of Four Seasons Athens. I ate extremely well, and was even more pleased to see a chef of Thodoris Papanikolaou’s calibre return to the spotlight with plenty still to say. In the space of a single summer, the restaurant achieved something every concept dreams of and very few actually manage: it makes you wonder, before you have even left, when you can come back. When the fires are extinguished and the umbrellas packed away, Astir’s old beach will undoubtedly retain something of this story.

And so a pop-up leaves behind the most “dangerous” thing of all for anything temporary: the feeling that you absolutely want it to be there again next summer.