Plyta: Honest Cuisine Made with Love
When four acclaimed chefs decide to cook together, the results can go one of two ways. Either it’s a culinary brawl, or it’s the sort of harmonious partnership that delivers dishes with emotional heft. Plyta, the new joint venture of the Akra and Cookoovaya teams—Periklis Koskinas, Giannis Loukakis, Marios Korovesis and Spyros Pediaditakis—lands squarely in the second camp. It’s already become a destination for people who know what good food looks like. And tastes like. And costs like. Because with dishes mostly in the €8 range, and only a few reaching €15–€19, the price-to-quality ratio is unbeatable.
Open for just over a month on its own namesake square in Pangrati, Plyta feels like someone grafted a neighbourhood kafeneio onto a gleaming industrial kitchen and then piped in the smoke from a proper grillhouse. You don’t come to Plyta to gawp at the decor. You come to eat. Which is, refreshingly, the point. Mosaic floors. Marble-topped tables. Wooden chairs. Grey walls. An open kitchen framed in metal, breathing gently over the flames. It’s minimalist, cool-toned, and uninterested in theatrics.
What unites these four talented chefs is the need to cook fiery, soulful dishes with honesty. Koskinas, Loukakis, Korovesis and Pediaditakis—men who have spent years tightening, elevating and sometimes overthinking Greek cuisine—are doing something far more dangerous here: they’re letting things be simple. The simplicity you get when skilled hands stop fussing and start trusting their instincts again. To take the food they were shaped by—not a prettified version, not a nostalgic lie—and make it sing again.
We ordered the tomato salad, drizzled with olive oil and oregano, a delicious leek and potato stew, a graviera pie – a textbook example of how Greek tavern classics can be restored to glory, an unapologetically garlicky skordalia, a fluffy, and surprisingly bold omelette with green chillis, glazed, woodfired carrots and raw prawns from Koilada. We ended with Pediaditakis’s buttery galaktoboureko.
This is simple cooking done right, with none of the circus tricks that so often masquerade as open-kitchen theatre in the hands of celebrity chefs.
Plyta, Amvrosiou Plyta 1–3, 11631 Athens
Tel: (+30) 210 0091318.
Open daily from 5pm; Sat–Sun from 12pm
