Don’t miss out on Sifnos, the tastiest Greek island

Sifnos’ culinary prowess has been millennia in the making; the island’s clay-rich soil has been used to make pottery since the Bronze Age, when it was shaped into the large vessels used to slow cook food. It’s a tradition that survives to this day, with classic local dishes including revithada (chickpea stew) and mastelo (lamb with wine and dill).

What to see and do in Sifnos, Greece

Giorgos Samoilis, one of Greece’s most revered chefs, pays homage to Sifnos’ slow-cooking heritage with Lamarina. Opened in the small fishing village of Faros last summer, this casual restaurant serves hearty portions of dishes like gemista (herby, rice-stuffed tomatoes and peppers) and pastitsio – a kind of Greek lasagne made with a layer of small tubes of pasta. ‘Lamarina is the name of the baking trays you make this traditional kind of food in,’ says Samoilis. ‘People used to fill them with food and take them to their local bakery to cook it overnight using the residual heat from their ovens.’

Samoilis was working as a molecular biologist in a diagnostic laboratory in Athens when he suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage. ‘It was a stress-related thing. It was my body telling me you’re going the wrong way.’ To recover, he moved to his mother’s native Sifnos and began working as a private chef before opening a contemporary seafood restaurant called Omega3.

Its success propelled Samoilis to launch a second restaurant, Cantina, in 2020. Housed in a cluster of stone fishermen’s huts, it sits in a tiny bay at the foot of a hill. On offer is a tasting menu that puts a refined spin on local classics, made using meat and produce sourced predominantly from Sifnos. Today, it’s something of a destination restaurant, with tables booking up months in advance.

At Bostani, the in-house restaurant of hotel Verina Astra, chef Nikos Thomas crafts dishes using locally-sourced produce and vegetables grown in the restaurant’s kitchen garden. Over the years, it’s become as famous for its revithada, which is served with beef marrow and fresh crayfish, as it has for the view from its terrace.

The whitewashed hilltop town of Kastro rises loftily against the shimmering azure backdrop of the Aegean, with the Seven Martyrs church perched prettily on a rocky peninsula behind. It’s a particularly mesmerising vista that becomes all the more dreamy at sunset.

A version of this article appears in the June 2026 Travel Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.