Athens Comes to Mykonos, for Six Weeks, Next Door to Matsuhisa

A restaurant that exists for six weeks a year is not a compromise. It is a decision about what the island is worth building for.

Since July 10, the Belvedere Hotel has been running an Iodio pop-up in the sunset-facing space next to its long-standing Matsuhisa outpost, and it stays open through August 23. Iodio is the Kolonaki restaurant Georgianna Hiliadaki opened in Athens, built around raw and lightly marinated fish rather than the grilled-and-sauced repertoire that dominates most seafood rooms on the island. Hiliadaki is not new to attention: she spent years as chef of Funky Gourmet, the Athens restaurant that made her the only Greek woman to have held two Michelin stars, before closing it in 2019 to build something smaller and, by her own account, closer to what she actually wanted to cook. Iodio, which opened in Kolonaki in November 2024, does not carry a star of its own — but it picked up two FNL stars, the closest thing Greece has to a domestic equivalent, and its chef was named the FNL Best Restaurant Awards' Chef of the Year for 2026.

The menu at the Belvedere keeps Iodio's core repertoire — pasta calamarata with Missolonghi bottarga among the dishes that travel from Kolonaki — and adds a run of Mykonos-inspired plates built around what the pop-up's own kitchen can source locally, rather than shipping everything in from Athens. It sits within a wider culinary programme the hotel has assembled for the season, alongside Matsuhisa's twentieth year on the property and the Italian room Cocco, and a private-town-access expansion the Belvedere opened for 2026 as well.

The interesting part isn't the pasta. It's the shape of the arrangement. A Mykonos beach hotel borrowing a mainland chef for the season used to mean a single guest-chef dinner, announced and photographed and gone within a week. Six weeks, a fixed menu, and a named kitchen team is a different commitment — closer to how Saint-Tropez and the Amalfi coast have long treated their summer pop-ups, and a sign that the island's dining rooms are competing less on the view than on who is actually standing at the pass. Reservations run through the hotel directly; the room seats a fraction of what Matsuhisa does next door, and it will not last past the third week of August.

— Camille