After opening his first restaurant in Montreal in 1979, with his Athens hotel and its Milos restaurant, Costas Spiliadis brought the Greek gastronomic grail he has refined for more than 43 years back to his homeland in 2022. The restaurant’s exquisite seafood is served in a soaring all-white dining room with huge columns, a winding staircase, and a striking sculpture by Greek artist Dimitris Fortsas. The food is thrillingly fresh, because so much of it was swimming or crawling in the Aegean Sea only a few hours earlier. The hotel, meanwhile, occupies two neoclassical buildings. The rooms display décor of a certain alluring and eternal Cycladic minimalism, including Greek-style furnishings, pendant lights, and marble-faced baths, warmed by wooden floors, oatmeal-colored curtains, and Scandi-meets-the-Med accent pieces. The hotel also has a wellness suite, offering treatments with Elemis products and a state-of-the-art gym that is open continuously. Perhaps the distinctive serenity of this hotel derives from what Costas Spiliadis has learned like countless other questing men and women before him: in the end, there’s no place like home—and especially the kitchen. —Alexander Lobrano

Alexander Lobrano is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. His latest book is the gastronomic coming-of-age story My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris