The argument that only a Greek chef can cook Greek food seriously is the same argument that was made about Japanese food before the 1990s, and about Italian food before that. It is the argument of a cuisine that has been misrepresented for so long that the misrepresentation has become the reference point. The California roll is not sushi. The Domino’s pizza is not pizza. The moussaka that has been sitting under a heat lamp in a London Greek restaurant since 1987 is not moussaka. Reintroducing the original requires someone who understands what the original actually is — and that understanding does not have to come from inheritance.

“The original doesn’t need reinventing. It needs a kitchen that takes it seriously.”

Louis Korovilas is not Greek. His career is built in the fine-dining tradition that takes technique seriously regardless of what it is being applied to: Locanda Locatelli for the rigour of Giorgio Locatelli’s Italian kitchen, Pied à Terre as head chef, Phil Howard’s operation, Bancone. When Glen Ballis brought him in as head chef at Clio in Marylebone, the question implicit in the appointment was whether that technique could do for Greek food what it had done for French and Italian: not simplify it for a market that didn’t know better, but apply the full weight of a serious kitchen to a cuisine that had been systematically undersold.

Clio opened in March 2026 on Chiltern Street. The taramasalata is the first signal. It is properly salty, properly savoury, made with the fish roe it is supposed to be made with, not the pink paste that has been served as taramasalata in this city for decades. The wine programme includes a barrel aged at a small Greek estate, blank-labelled, exclusive to Clio in London — a sourcing decision that tells you the kitchen is thinking about Greece as a real place with real producers, not as an aesthetic.

Korovilas is making the same argument that Nobu made about Japanese food in the 1990s, or that the wave of Neapolitan pizzerias made about pizza in the 2000s: that the cuisine deserves a kitchen as serious as the cuisine itself. It was not a complicated argument. London was just waiting for someone to make it about Greek food.