Greece's Achilleas Plakidas Made a Bar So Good the Police Arrested Him

Just three years after he first stepped foot behind a bar, Achilleas Plakidas decided with the utmost confidence that it was time for him to have a bar of his own in Thessaloniki, the Greek coastal city he calls home. What was really missing in the scene, he decided, was a place not only with very fine drinks, but with music to match—a place that could really get people dancing and flirting just like in the bars of the good old days. He succeeded.

At the opening night of Gorilla, which has since made it onto Europe’s 50 Best Bars of 2026, the bar was so packed with the more than 500 people who showed up that the police came in and detained Plakidas.

“It was really good free advertising,” Achilleas Plakidas tells SceneEats cheerfully, recounting the ordeal as though it were simply a minor inconvenience.

Flying in from Greece for Cairo Food Week 2026, the Thessalonian was one of many international chefs and mixologists brought in by Flavor Republic Ventures and their partners to create a conversation around Egyptian culinary culture, merging their table and all its intricacies with our own. At Tamara Haus in Downtown Cairo, when we spoke to Plakidas he was preparing for the sixth edition of ‘Architecture of Taste’, a series where where food and drink is broken down into its constituent elements and examined for how it takes inspiration from our surroundings.

Plakidas was perhaps a perfect candidate for this task: behind (or rather beneath) the drinks at his world-renowned bar is a laboratory where a quitter kind of magic happens.

“In 2017, we dug the basement of Gorilla to create a fully-equipped laboratory, and that’s where we spend about 50 hours of the week,” Plakidas explains. Among other high-tech equipment, Gorilla’s laboratory contains re-distillers where they create their famed clear-coloured shots that can taste like just about anything you can imagine, centrifuges where they separate the juice of anything from its solid matter, and a very precious and expensive flask that has only been broken 10 times.

“Everything in the bar is made in the lab,” Plakidas says. By all means, he had found a recipe for international success: a world-class laboratory below ground, and aboveground a bar that was becoming a mainstay of Thessaloniki nightlife. If not success, it was at least a recipe for a lot of fun.

In fact, one Friday evening in 2018, as a finalist for Greece’s premier national bartending competition World Class Greece, Plakidas was having so much fun that he completely missed an email from the competition regarding an important deadline.

Undisturbed by the subsequent penalty, Plakidas got to work on the vision that ultimately won him the whole prize: a drinkable taco, complete with tequila, coriander oil, red peppers and tomatoes.

“This was the best cocktail I ever made,” says Plakidas. “It tastes like a taco, but… it’s not.”

But Plakidas’s lab doesn’t always produce such gems. “Many years ago, we were making cocktails about the time that a gorilla exists from a baby to a teenager. So there was one cocktail called the Baby’s Breath, and we wanted it to have the aroma of talc, the powder.”

“We re-distilled the talc, and then we realized that this was so, so illegal. It was very poisonous.”

Needless to say, Plakidas didn’t want another run-in with the police. He immediately put an end to the experiment.

Police aside, for Cairo Food Week’s ‘Architecture of Taste’, powered by Alchemy Experience, Plakidas created a menu similarly rooted in experimentation and fun. Hosted by Hourig Mekhtigian at Tchai, Tamara Haus, the evening brought his drinks together with edible installations by Blak By O’s Chef Omar Semary and desserts by Chou Chou’s Clarisse Loewengard and Sherif Fanous. Plakidas’s mixology drew on local ingredients including mahleb, cardamom, tomatoes and peaches, while accounting for a rather important fact of drinking in Cairo: plenty of people don’t. For them, he devised alcohol-free creations with the same attention given to the cocktails.

“When Cairo Food Week invited me to Egypt, I was really interested because I had never been before, and I was really impressed by Egyptian food culture.” While here, Plakidas says he wants to explore all these flavours and transport them to Gorilla.

But there’s one thing he relied on Cairo’s audience to bring themselves:

“We need music and we need some dancing people. Then we’ll really turn Tamara Haus into Gorilla.”