Funky Gourmet

Frozen salad at the pass

A white quenelle carries cucumber, olive, feta and olive oil in cold suspension; Georgianna Hiliadaki, Michelin-starred chef at Funky Gourmet in Athens, built that kind of Modern Greek turn into the house from its opening in 2009. Her work here sits inside a wider pattern of ownership and authorship: training at the University of Reading and the Institute of Culinary Education, then kitchens shaped by co-founding, executive control and new rooms in Athens and London. Funky Gourmet is the first fixed point in that sequence, the address where the idea became a restaurant rather than a position on someone else’s pass.

Hiliadaki’s role at Funky Gourmet is not separate from the rest of her practice. She is owner, co-founder and executive chef here, executive chef and co-founder of OPSO Restaurant since 2014, chef/owner of Modern Greek Food Group, and owner and chef of IODIO since 2024. The through line is Modern Greek cuisine treated as material for revision, not as a museum piece. At Funky Gourmet, that has meant memory placed under pressure: the village salad made icy, the familiar table recast through technique, the Greek pantry asked to hold its shape after the method has changed.

Illusion as kitchen discipline

The program at Funky Gourmet works through tasting-menu construction, advanced technique and visual misdirection. A Greek salad can arrive as sorbet. Cuttlefish becomes an Oreo-shaped bite, with ink darkening the biscuit form and poached flesh set into the centre. A soft-boiled egg appears at dessert, its shell made from chocolate, its white from coconut ice cream, its yolk from mango purée. The trick matters only because the flavour lands where the eye has been led away.

The restaurant has been associated with 2 Michelin Stars, and the cooking explains the number more plainly than any adjective would. Courses move through transformation, concealment and release; Greek references remain legible, even when their form has been rebuilt. Bread and olives once appeared through a miniature olive tree with edible olives tasting of olive oil and bread. The gesture is playful, but the bench-side requirement is severe: texture, temperature, sequence and recognition all have to arrive together, or the joke collapses before the dish reaches the guest.

The room above Kerameikos

The original room sat upstairs in a neoclassical building at Paramithias 13 and Salaminos, in Kerameikos, with large open windows, subtle artworks and a dining room described around a capacity of 30 people. The scale suited the work. This was not food that could disappear into noise; each course needed a pause, a look, then the second understanding that comes after the first bite.

Service moved with the same sense of choreography as the kitchen. The room was intimate, dimly lit and controlled without feeling severe, with a private dining room and a cocktail bar on the ground floor. At the pass, the craft depended on timing as much as invention: a sorbet held at the right point, an illusion carried to the table before heat or attention undid it, a Greek reference kept close enough to be recognized.

A Modern Greek line carried forward

Funky Gourmet belongs to the part of Hiliadaki’s career where authorship became repeatable. The later openings did not replace it; they extended the same question through other rooms, other cities and other kinds of service. Her signature frozen greek salad and pastitsio peinirli make the point directly: memory remains useful when the hands keep changing its form.

At Funky Gourmet, the Greek salad became a white quenelle with a miniature spade.