Aleria Restaurant — Restaurant in Athens

This place is amazing.

My wife and I spent a few days in Athens at the end of our trip to Greece and we had heard about the gastronomy movement that has gained popularity here. Aleria came up on many "must eat" lists so we booked a table a few weeks before our trip.

From the moment we walked in we were taken aback by the whole experience. We sat down at 8:30pm on a Saturday and the wait staff at the nearly empty restaurant was extremely professional, courteous, and they all SMILED. What a concept. The menu features all sorts of inventive takes on Greek and international dishes but we both went for the degustation menu. All I can say is WOW. 5 courses paired with excellent wines and every dish is well thought out, well-balanced, and wonderful. The first course was a tartare of a local Mediterannean fish (the name escapes me), and it was fantastic. Melted in your mouth. Nice white wine from north of Athens paired with it. Next was a pumpkin mousse with roasted chestnuts and olive oil. Amazing. The next few dishes were roasted lamb with white carrot puree and a pickled pepper - excellent - and then a soft pasta dish with braised oxtail that was paired with a very good red wine from Greece. Dessert was a Macedonian mousse with praline from tahini, lemon sorbet, and caramelized peanuts. Amazing.

*One of the great things about this menu, too, was that the wine pours were real pours - full glasses. We have tried so many "prix fixe" or "tasting" menus that were twice as expensive as this meal but the wine pours were a fraction of what they should have been. Aleria gives you a true glass of wine with each dish. I appreciate that.

This place simply "gets it." Provide customers with an amazing experience from top to bottom, deliver great and welcoming service, and charge a reasonable price. We had 2 cocktails before dinner and each had the degustation menu and the bill was 140 Euro. Wow. This meal would cost $300 in the US. The only tiny thing that wasn't perfect started at about 10:00pm when the restaurant started getting packed, and the service slowed down considerably. But I think this is more the "Greek way" - to let customers sit and enjoy the end of a meal and relax for a while rather than flush them out of the seat so as to "turn the table."

Bravo, Aleria, for giving my wife and I (both of us are foodies) an...

Overrated experience and food mostly. Two stars because the same experience in an average restaurant I would give it more stars due to the effort. But this result from a high end restaurant as Aleria, for me means negligence and mediocrity and I will explain. Two stars for the atmosphere. We were there in the summer, sitting in the yard and it was a horrendous torture. We were a table with many of us sweating and wishing to get out of there running. Two meager ventilators for a kids' room, gave us nothing, and when you are sweating like in a sauna with clothes, nothing will go well. I wonder why a classy restaurant such as Aleria, does not invest in exterior cooling systems. Don't they care about the CX? I hope to see that remedied next summer. Second, the food is overrated to my great surprise and disappointment. I was expecting the notorious chef of Athens to showcase more skill and talent. What I experienced was far from that. I ordered the Earth and Sea menu and only one or two of the dishes were excellent. The main course dishes were a sheer disappointment. Maybe coming from the Brussels scene, where such a restaurant brings tears in your eyes from the bliss, the not met expectations, augmented the disappointment. In any average restaurant I would reward the effort. But here, the experience made me sad. FYI, the Vegan Menu I tasted from my friend's dishes was far better. I wish I had this menu. I don't know if this was a bad moment, or if the heat made it all worse. I wish to return and have a bliss that I can share with you all. Pity. The service was excellent! A choreography of 7-10 waiters, coming and going in perfect synchronization, it was an amazing sight because we were many of us. So was the deserts, exquisite. Bravo to the...

I really wanted to love this restaurant, but it just quite didn't meet up to what it was trying so hard to be. First the high notes: the garden location is exquisite and the staff is really friendly... everyone just really busy trying to create a wonderful experience. As such, the experience started off wonderfully at our 7PM seating. We ordered cocktails and ordered the 5 course traditional tasting menu, since this is really what they're creating, a tasting experience. There are 2 menus with the choice of 4, 5 or 6 dishes, one traditional menu and one which is more vegetarian. By the time we got to our third course which was a "meatball", what came out was literally meat "ball" of beef tartare. OK, not what we expected since I despise beef tartare (the menu did not specify tartar and they admitted it). Not their fault and unfortunate, but it's how they interacted with me after that merited 3 stars perhaps less. They simply ignored my not wanting this course. The maitre didn't address it, etc. They just overlooked it and then we never saw our original waiter, just the server brnging out the next courses. I think they tired to comp it with a cheese dish, but we weren't sure what was going on anymore - they just stopped the wonderful service that was happening prior to that little bump. Anyhow 2 hours later, as we were just trying to end this discomfort, the whole experience just became overbearing and the food in the end, for a €200 dinner for 2 in Athens, did not measure up to places like Ithaki and others at the "haute cuisine" level in Athens. WE REALLY WANTED TO LOVE THIS PLACE BUT IT...