Where Athens’ Aesthetes go to Drink
Boo hoo. The season of the rooftop bar is almost at an end – with many of the city’s panoramic outdoor venues moving the action back indoors from October. Take advantage of the last few weeks of this sultry September to imbibe on a creative cocktail or memorable meal at the ultra-stylish Point α Bar & Restaurant at the Herodion Hotel.
One of our very favourite places to salute summer is Point α Bar & Restaurant at the Herodion Hotel. Still something of an “insiders secret”, there is something extremely special about this relatively-new rooftop den that keeps us hooked. We put it down to the effortless aesthetic, its wonderfully arty take on food, the intoxicating urban view – and all the clever little touches, such as the coasters and napkins which have the numbers 289 and 85 marked on them like some secret code to remind us of the distance (in metres!) from the Acropolis and the museum respectively.
It’s exactly this kind of fun trivia that transforms itself as a clever marketing strategy as well as a brand identity for Point α because here, you won’t need to crane your neck to see a blurred silhouette of the famous temple – the Acropolis is smack in front of your face!
While the setting is magical, it’s the design elements at Point α that score top marks for us. A stylish terrace with a wooden deck, subtle lighting and a casually elegant atmosphere, Point α is pitch perfect locale for a drink to watch the sun loom over the temple before it turns into a fiery red ball or for a quiet moonlit dinner. For art aficionados, the bar also serves as a gallery showcasing some of Greece’s most talented artists and sculptors, scouted from the neighbouring galleries.
For those who’d rather nurse their drinks as veteran barflies, watching the bartender play alchemist, the high bar-stools are the perfect perch from which to observe his sublime skills as he anchors a delicately-seared tapas onto a chilled Greek-inspired cocktail.
If you’d like to linger a little longer to savour chefs Manolis Mavrigiannakis and Marios Pirpiridis’s inventive summer menu, we’d highly recommend the ravioli with octopus ragout, the turnip noodles with white “taramas” and botargo tea, or the croaker fish with courgette flowers.
For meat-lovers, try the Kid(goat) with green beans and myzithra cheese and ‘capricó’ pork served with lemon marmalade. A watering-hole that offers so much more, Point α is a great excuse to play tourist for an evening to re-discover the capital and to indulge in some serious story-telling!
Find Point α on the 5th floor, Hotel Herodion, 4 Rovertou Galli street, Acropolis. Operating daily from 6pm to midnight until October. For reservations: +30 210.923.6832. To read more, visit here
