Polychronis Damalas grew up Cretan, trained Japanese, cooks Greek. The path is the point.

“I shop the farmer's market every morning. That's the whole menu.”

He started at Nobu in New York more than twenty years ago — a young Greek stage in the kitchen that, more than any other, was teaching the world how to fuse east with west. He came back to Athens through the restaurants that mattered for Japanese in Greece: Sea You Up, Kiku, Gaspar, Izakaya, Cash. The last of the long pre-RawBata years were at Ovac, the Cavo Tagoo restaurant on Mykonos that he made into a destination.

After Cavo Tagoo he stopped. Married Fotini Markoutsa, took a year, and reopened in Athens on Lakonias Street in the spring of 2024 with her at the front of house. The restaurant is called RawBata — robata is the Japanese word for the charcoal grill at its centre — and the cooking is what the years built him: Greek ingredients shopped from his farmer's market that morning, treated with Japanese technique, served with very little ceremony.

The menu changes almost daily. The chef is on the floor as often as in the kitchen. Of all the chefs in this generation of Athenian cooking, Damalas is the one most likely to be eating with the guests by midnight.