The natural generosity of Greek food – shared plates of fresh, seasonal produce, charcoal, olive oil, wine – enjoyed at a table with people you love, suits the way Australians want to eat now. Meet some of the chefs and restaurateurs leading a Greek dining revival stretching from Adelaide’s seaside to the suburbs.
Adelaide’s Greek dining scene is being reimagined with a new confidence. From scratch-made desserts, to traditional tavernas and modern Mediterranean dining rooms, a string of new eateries is drawing from deep culinary tradition while offering something distinctly of the moment.
To be fair, Greek food has always had a place in Adelaide, Australia’s third-largest home to Greek diaspora behind Melbourne and Sydney but this revival feels special.
As ‘simple’ as the philosophy is around Greek food – fresh meat, seafood and produce, in season, locally sourced and with little done to it, leaving nowhere for the cook to hide – the stories behind the food and the people serving it are getting Greek dining noticed.
As we head into longer days and balmy evenings, expect even more of a spotlight on new Greek tables, including a still under wraps inner-city Adelaide collaboration from two well-known Georges, George Kasimatis of Georges on Waymouth and Melbourne’s George Calombaris.
“We’re always going to be proud of where we’ve come from,” says veteran restaurateur George Kasimatis of the Greek heritage many of the chefs and restaurateurs share. “We’re also confident enough to move forward. That’s what ‘s exciting about Greek dining in Australia at the moment, it’s moving forward.”
The revival has been in full swing in Sydney and Melbourne for several years, with notable new eateries including 200-seat Olympus Dining, meze-style diner Ela Ela, and Athens-inspired Homer Rogue Taverna in Sydney; and Aegli, Taverna, Voula’s Taverna and Kafeneion in Melbourne.
Chargrilled Robe Octopus. Photo: Jack Fenby
The signature World’s Longest Lunch event at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival this year served a Greek feast to more than 1,500 people, and in Adelaide, The Greek Table was a special event held during the 2026 Adelaide Fringe.
“There’s definitely been a shift in the way Greek food and hospitality are being represented here,”says seasoned chef and restaurateur Billy Petropoulos. Recently returned from a month-long taverna tasting tour around Greece, he says it’s “exciting to see so many people bringing their own interpretation to Greek food while still respecting where it all comes from.”
Vasili’s Table – Billy Petropoulos.
A new wave of Greek dining
Petropoulos’ latest venture, Vasili’s Table at Adelaide’s West Beach is among the new wave of Greek eateries in South Australia. Open less than a year, Vasili’s Table recently won Best New Restaurant in South Australia at the 2026 Restaurant & Catering Australia Hostplus Awards for Excellence.
On the city fringe, a buzzing Caramella Patisserie on Hutt Street is fast becoming the place for a Greek coffee and a piece of baklava, galaktoboureko or spanakopita like yiayia would make if yiayia were a pastry chef like Manolis Tsougranis.
Vasili’s Table
Restaurateur Simon Kardachi’s Greek-inspired Omada opened in a heritage CBD building on the corner of Leigh and Currie Streets. Its striking minimalist European and classic Greek fit-out by Adelaide design firm studio gram won the Hospitality Design Award at the 2026 Australian Interior Design Awards.
And the Kasimatis/Calombaris venture is in the works.
“The time just feels right for us to show another side of Greece,” says Kasimatis. “Greek venues are quite hot now in Australia – in Sydney in Melbourne, as well as Adelaide. Everyone is showing Greek food with their own interpretation.”
Athens calling in Norwood
Kasimatis says his new collab with longtime friend George Calombaris is personal: a passion project that the pair has been plotting for at least the past two years.
The new eatery will open this summer beneath 65 new apartments at developer Pep Rocca’s $95 million Orta apartment project on the corner of The Parade and Osmond Terrace.
Chargrilled split prawns. Photo: Jack Fenby
“Norwood needs a little Athens,” says Kasimatis. He says basing the new restaurant in suburban Norwood in Adelaide’s inner east, a short drive from his CBD restaurant and near his home, is intentional. “We want to connect with the community; we want to be part of the neighbourhood.”
The team isn’t ready to unveil the name yet but don’t expect Greek gods or island names to feature. All Kasimatis will say is, Athens is calling.
Think modern Athens, contemporary, sophisticated and energetic, with fabulous restaurants and bars that dominate Europe’s cocktail scene. Athens was the biggest winner in the first edition of Europe’s 50 Best Bars, with Line and The Bar in Front of the Bar crowned in the top two spots and several others earning places among the continent’s leading cocktail destinations.
Yemista. Photo: Teresa Di Fava
Greece has evolved incredibly, says Kasimatis. “If you go to Athens today, the restaurants are incredible, the wine bars, the neighbourhood tavernas, cocktail bars – it’s huge.”
He says the new venture won’t be trying to create a Greek taverna in Adelaide – “it’s more about the interpretation of a modern Athens with an old-world charm. It will be casual but sophisticated, the restaurant will respect Greek flavours and ingredients and present them through a contemporary Australian lens.” And of course, it will have a signature Kasimatis/Calombaris twist on it.
Another clue to tease us: Kasimatis says the restaurant will feed you, but the bar will keep you. Oh, and there will be surprises “we want people to discover when they walk through the door”.
Rizogalo before baking. Photo: Jack Fenby
An emotional response
Every business comes with a story, and Greek stories inevitably include family and friends. provenance and generosity.
Simon Kardachi’s longstanding friendship with Adelaide property developers and managers, the Ginos family, sparked his concept for Omada, a nod to their heart and homeland.
Photo: Teresa Di Fava
After sharing tables with the Ginos family in Greece, talking and eating, “I thought what a unique and beautiful opportunity to bring some of that back to Adelaide,” says Kardachi. Like all his restaurants, the design detail at Omada seeks to evoke “an emotional response that takes (diners) somewhere else”.
Kardachi’s hospitality empire includes Fugazzi, Osteria Oggi, Shobosho and Latteria. He says he chose to open Omada in Adelaide’s CBD because it hadn’t had a good Greek restaurant in a long time.
Working Partners, left to right – Andrew Ferrara, Alex Cece, Tommy. Photo: Teresa Di Fava & Luca Rego
While perhaps forgotten in the plethora of Italian and Asian influence in Australia, “in the last four or five years, people have realised that Greek food has always been wonderful …founded on thousands of years of tradition and heart,” he says.
Kasimatis agrees. “Adelaide has always had a strong connection to Greek culture – there are generations of Greek families here but at the same time Australians have travelled to Greece more than ever and are experiencing a different side of the country – the restaurants, the bars, the produce, the wine and the incredible sense of hospitality.”
Inside Omada. Photo
Coming home, wanting more
Greece is the 11th-ranked destination for Australian travellers. Sure, the diaspora makes the annual pilgrimage to their family village but, like Italy, Spain and France thousands of tourists with no ties to the country choose to explore and eat their way across Greece.
And while away, Australians travellers are among Greece’s highest-spending and longest-staying visitors, according to a 2026 study by INSETE, the research institute of the Greek Tourism Confederation.
Some of the menu items at Omada. Photo: Teresa Di Fava
“They’re coming home and wanting more than the Greek food they have traditionally associated with Australia,” says Kasimatis.
Smart restaurateurs and chefs realise that there’s a platform to really showcase Greek food, says Kardachi, and they’re responding as we’re seeing with the wave of new Greek-inspired restaurants around Australia.
Simplicity and longevity
The ubiquitous focus on health and longevity, supported by the so-called Blue Zone and Mediterranean diets linked to living beyond 90, also work in Greece’s favour. The Aegean Island of Ikaria is one of the world’s original five Blue Zones, renowned for supporting long and healthful lives by eating what’s readily available, along with moving and being part of a village community.
Ikaria helped bump beans and legumes, wild greens (horta) and other hyper-local produce into the spotlight, and onto our tables.
Petropoulos’s Ikaria-born mother, Eve is an influence in his garden-to-plate homestyle cooking, and his father Spiro, who was born in Kalamata, tends a bountiful garden at the back of his seaside taverna.
At the many restaurants Petropoulos has opened over the years there were “layers upon layers, flavours upon flavours, spices on top of spices: I’ve left Greek to last because of the simplicity of it. I’ve peeled off the layers now, and at this time of my life I’m finding what’s true about cooking is good ingredients, cooked very well and as simply as possible.
“That’s what people are enjoying the most and Greek cuisine is exactly that,” says Petropoulos.
Fig and grain salad. Photo: Teresa Di Fava
Hospitality from the heart
All the restaurateurs point to filoxenia – the hospitality of the heart that Greeks are known for – as a defining factor that makes eating at Greek tables special.
Kardachi says the spirit of generosity is the philosophy for all his businesses, and at Omada, diners begin their meal with a glass of house-made ouzo or Greek sparkling to set the tone before they’ve even contemplated the menu.
At Caramella, only a few months open and they already have regulars coming by for their coffee and a chat with Manolis and his wife Izabela at front of house. “We want to welcome people,” says Izabela. “It’s about the food but also the music, the conversation, the hospitality.”
Chef Andrew Ferrara. Photo: Teresa Di Fava
Petropoulos says: “It’s about welcoming you to the table and letting us feed you and take care of you. You come in a stranger and leave a friend.”
For Kasimatis, who has worked the floor at Georges on Waymouth for its 24 years and will be hands on running operations at the new venture, it is always about how a restaurant makes you feel.
“When people leave their world to come into our world, for me that is major,” he says. “I want them to feel the love, the authenticity and the generosity.”
Vasili’s Table
Billy Petropoulos isn’t trying to reinvent Greek food so much as return to it.
He’s fresh back from eating this way around the Greek islands, sampling 60 to 70 tavernas in a month, and his latest venture Vasili’s Table, inspired by island tavernas, has won Best New South Australian Restaurant at the 2026 Restaurant & Catering Australia Hostplus Awards for Excellence.
After more than 25 years in hospitality, he says Vasili’s Table at the West Beach allows him to bring together the parts of cooking and culture that have stayed closest to him: the food of his parents and grandparents, the ease of the taverna, and the Greek idea of filoxenia – welcoming a stranger in and sending them away as a friend.
At Vasili’s Table garden patch. Photo: Supplied
This project is personal. His previous restaurants were not Greek, and while he describes them as good businesses, he says this one “has everything i wanted to put into it. It’s got heart and soul.”
He knew when he saw the West Beach location that it was exactly what he wanted.
“I knew what needed to be here – the timing was right and I was ready to go back into doing something that was really close to me.”
His father Spiro looks after the substantial garden, and vegetables grown on site make their way into the kitchen. His mother Eve’s Ikarian upbringing, influences the cooking.
Billy talks about Greek food with the language of someone who has spent years adding layers, then learning to take them away. “I’ve left Greek to last because of the simplicity of it,” he says.
Simon Kardachi enjoying hospitality with the Ginos Family in Germa, August 2025. Pictured L-R: Athena Ginos, George Ginos, Connie Ginos, Zis Ginos, Simon Kardachi.
“I’ve peeled off the layers now and at this time of my life I’m finding what’s true about cooking is good ingredients, cooked very well and as simple as possible and that’s what people are enjoying the most and Greek cuisine is exactly that.
That philosophy shows in dishes that stay close to home cooking while allowing for “a little texture, a little twist”.
“Your mother might make the best moussaka and your dad the best pastitsio – we can’t argue with that, but we can provide the feeling of what you once had.”
Around it all is the atmosphere he says he wanted to create – music, food from the garden, and the unhurried feeling of enjoying the moment.
Caramella finds its sweet spot in Adelaide
When pâtissier Manolis Tsougranis and his wife Izabela Zywicka stepped out of the airport in Adelaide on a fine, windy day earlier this year, the well-travelled pair knew almost immediately that the city was their future.
They came for a holiday, a break from the relentless heat of Darwin and the routine of running a patisserie.
Baklava Parfait. Photo: Jack Fenby
“It was sunny, nice – it was heaven,” Izabela says. “We’ve been in love with this place since.”
That first impression made a permanent impact. The owners of Caramella Patisserie in Hutt Street on the city fringe, traded Darwin for Adelaide, bringing with them a family story shaped by migration, long hours and the old-school baking discipline.
Izabela and Manolis met on the Greek island of Kos. Manolis was cooking in a hotel where Izabela waitressed. They were doing what young Europeans do, moving around to earn a living. Izabela was in Greece post studies in her native Poland, and West Australian-born Manolis was in Kos from Kalymnos, where he moved with his Greek family when he was six.
His working life began early. When he wasn’t interested in continuing school beyond primary level, his mother told him he’d have to get a job. At 12, he was apprenticing as a pastry chef – getting an education in patience and instinct.
“He learned the old ways,” says Izabela. “It was in the time when everything was from scratch. There were no premixes, no shortcuts.”
That philosophy still guides Caramella. Manolis is in the kitchen from 6am, stirring custards over gas and preparing sweets and pies made with Filo pastry or Kourou – the traditional, rustic Greek shortcrust pastry – with the same hands-on approach he learned decades earlier. Izabela joins him at 7am, moving between the shop and home, where family life awaits.
Ouzo table service. Photo: Jack Fenby
Their children, Anna and Iourdanis, are already involved in the business: Anna helps upfront while Iourdanis, who goes by Danny, is learning behind the scenes in what has become a shared family project.
The decision to relocate to Adelaide was swift. At the end of April, the family booked a five-day holiday in Adelaide to rest from the Darwin heat. On the final day, Manolis met the owner of the Hutt Street space Caramella now occupies.
“He decided then and there that he wanted to sell up and move here,” Izabela says.
Within days of returning to Darwin, they found a buyer for the patisserie they had run for six years. Within a month, the family had packed up, moved south and started again. Before Darwin they had lived in Ireland, so they’re no strangers to moving.
They arrived in Adelaide at the end of May and opened Caramella Patisserie in June.
The welcome was immediate. From the first month, they were busy, and Izabela says they were surprised by the strength and variety of Adelaide’s Greek community. Customers hailed from Sparta, Rhodes, Trikala and beyond, recognising flavours that connected them to home.
But Caramella’s appeal has stretched further than the Greek community.
Lesbos spritz. Photo: Jack Fenby
“Greeks like the Greek food because it’s familiar, and Aussies like the Greek food because it’s different,” Izabela says. “It’s good, it has fresh products, everything is handmade. And the people – they stop and talk to me. Manolis and I, we want to welcome people.”
That welcome is central to the feeling of Greek dining. Beyond the galaktoboureko, spanakopita – the first item to sell out, a range of baklavas – from traditional almond and walnut to apple and cherry – biscuits, cakes and coffee – there is also music, conversation and hospitality.
Izabela says the number of Greek restaurants opening in Adelaide surprised her but not by the appetite for the food.
“People love the food,” she says. “They say Mediterranean food is very healthy. It’s simple, but it’s very healthy and it’s good.”
Adelaide, with its Mediterranean light and relatively easy winters, has given the family the feeling of arrival after years of movement. There is no hesitation about what comes next: “This is the last stop, Adelaide,” says Izabela. “I’m not moving again.”
*Lee Theodoros is a freelance journalist and communications consultant based in Adelaide. She has written about businesses and the people behind them for three decades in Australia in New York.
Source: Neos Kosmos
