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Morpheus indulges in world-class cuisine at the Sensimar Atlantica Imperial Resort Rhodes

Morpheus explores the world of luxury from his home base in Athens, Greece, and shares some of his experiences with the readers of TravelDailyNews.

Just let me get this off my chest: I have been quite a snob towards hotels working exclusively with mass-market tour operators and particularly all-inclusive hotels. I have avoided picking such hotels for my own holidays and most times I stayed there for professional reasons I was rather disappointed (except of a few cases of outstanding hospitality). Mass processing, mediocre food, uninspired décor – not my cup of tea. 

My recent visit to the beachfront Atlantica Imperial Resort & Spa on the island of Rhodes showed me how wrong I was in my prejudice. I expected a boring hotel experience, but I got to enjoy finesse and hospitality at its best. The greatest surprise of this stay? The food, simply world-class!

Here’s my testimony.

The concept
Every great hospitality experience is the outcome of somebody’s hard work. In our case this all started when the Nicolaides family of Cyprus decided to bring their successful Atlantica Hotels brand – a joint venture with Europe’s largest tour operator TUI – to the Greek islands and to create their flagship resort on the island of Rhodes. Nicolis Nicolaides and his sons Vassilis and Dimitris picked a location right on the shores of Kolymbia Beach in one of the quieter parts of the island and opened the hotel in 2002. Since then they’ve never stopped upgrading and improving the hotel, thus further establishing it among the best holiday resorts of Greece.

The Atlantica Imperial Resort & Spa has been operating in recent years under one of TUI’s premium brands, Sensimar. Sensimar stands mainly for two things: adults-only holidays and hotels with upscale dining. Now marketed as the TUI Sensimar Imperial Resort & Spa by Atlantica, the hotel can be booked exclusively through TUI and its subsidiaries. 

Particularly strong are the resort’s culinary credentials. True to Sensimar’s concept of sophisticated dining, the multi-award-winning Atlantica Imperial has taken food to the next level, thus attracting praise and receiving the highest ratings from its guests. The hotel’s main buffet restaurant is complemented by three à la carte restaurants ranging from Greek to fusion and French-inspired gourmet cuisine.

The hotel comes with all the blessings of a five-star seaside resort: comfy beach facilities, manicured gardens, a large, free-style pool and several shared pools spread across the hotel grounds, rooms overlooking the sea as well as an array of sports and leisure facilities.

Together with the brand-new Atlantica Imperial Residences, the resort totals 405 rooms, suites and villas, some of them featuring private pools. Despite its large size, the resort feels much smaller due to the smartly designed hotel grounds, the efficiently run main buffet restaurant and the personalized service offered by the friendly staff.

The person in charge of running the day-to-day business of the complex is the General Manager Christos Georganas, an experienced hotelier and a passionate gourmand himself. He has been working systematically in installing the proper service attitude to his staff and in upgrading the hotel’s culinary offerings.

In a very lucky constellation the hotel hired Ilias Kakouris to take over the role of Executive Chef at the Atlantica Imperial, recruiting, assembling and heading a team of 70 people. This successful culinary professional faced a very challenging task: To convince hotel guests who have already prepaid their dinners at the buffet restaurant – through booking either a half-board or an all-inclusive holiday package – to spend additional money not in one or two, but in three à la carte restaurants.

How do you do that? How do you lure your guests away from a high-quality buffet with a huge variety of Greek and Mediterranean specialties that they have already paid for and make them pay extra money? How do you keep operating these restaurants that most hoteliers dealing with all-inclusive guests would deem unnecessary and unprofitable?

Achieving this aim became a priority for Christos Georganas and Ilias Kakouris. They created three culinary concepts that proved to be very attractive to their guests and garnered excellent ratings and several distinctions for the hotel. 

I experienced these restaurants and would like to share my firsthand impressions with my dear readers.

The cuisine
The Mylos Restaurant celebrates Greek cuisine at its best. Named after the attached traditional windmill, the restaurant offers uninterrupted views of the sea from the romantically appointed indoor and outdoor seating areas.

Guests are greeted here in a very generous way. Everybody is offered a complimentary shot of ouzo accompanied by a wooden platter overflowing with typical Greek treats such as pita bread, prawns, fava, tzatziki, olives, meat balls, Cretan cured meat, feta cheese, handmade fried potatoes as well as cheese and chicken pies.

The menu boasts a selection of typical Greek fare. Some classic dishes such as the seafood orzo or the slightly modernized Greek salad are being prepared in the authentic way. However, Kakouris and his team have put lots of creativity and imagination in reinterpreting popular traditional dishes, so I just had to give them a try.

Dinner started with the kakavia Greek fish soup delicately scented with Kozani saffron and sweet chili foam, followed by my favourite dish, the octopus carpaccio accompanied by tomato sorbet, cucumber caviar and an olive-oil and yuzu dressing. Equally tasty was the sautéed crispy sea bream with tomato marmalade served on a bed of warm rocket salad. Simply delicious!

I then moved on to the meat dishes to sample succulent trahanas – a fermented mixture of grain and milk – combined with wild mushrooms and lamb in a herb crust, graviera cheese sponge and fennel puree. The most nostalgic among the dishes was a traditional Greek comfort food, the pork fillet filled with wild Greek greens, zucchini carpaccio and lemon butter sauce, beautifully presented in a modern way.

The chef’s creativity was especially evident in the case of the impressively styled desserts such as the Greek yogurt mousse with chocolate shells, the saffron sponge and the honey jelly resembling a seascape! Finally, as it was time to conclude this amazing dinner, I was treated to mignardise chocolates and bite-size fruit.

Wow, what a feel-good dining experience, what a great way to explore the country’s great culinary traditions! This meal was definitely the highlight of my visit to Rhodes as it gave me the opportunity to sample the local cuisine executed in the best possible way.

However, there was more to come…

The next evening I opted for the Blue Bay Restaurant, the resort’s most opulent fine-dining venue boasting French-inspired modern cuisine. Diners are offered a choice of three different tasting menus. 

Before indulging in the eight-course menu, I witnessed the restaurant’s ritual of the aperitif. A bartender went from table to table pushing a cart stocked with dozens of ingredients to celebratorily prepare just one single drink: gin tonic, the restaurant’s lavish signature cocktail made with a choice of premium brands such as Hendrick's and G'Vine. The cocktail is being scented in a myriad ways, with ingredients ranging from thyme, basil and cucumber to pimenta, lime zest and strawberries. Definitely worth a try!

Dinner started in the most delicious way with fois gras accompanied by onion coulis and little meringues finely scented with truffle oil and shaped like mushrooms sprouting on the dish. The tasty parsley root foam with sesame, prosciutto and ginger-lime vinaigrette was followed by another highlight, the salmon tartar served with beetroot and apple, cockles with celeriac, Symi shrimps and octopus.

The celebration of seafood continued with two more extraordinary dishes, the luscious soup made of cod, green vegetables and truffle as well as the sautéed lobster sensationally paired with white chocolate sauce, bisque, king oyster mushrooms and roasted hazelnut cake.

Standing out among the meat dishes was the milk-fed veal marinated in liquid coal and served with beetroot balsamic sauce. An interesting detail: With the meat course comes a selection of scented knives by Laguiole.

This cosmopolitan dining experience climaxed with the serving of a white chocolate sorbet, bitter chocolate mousse and spearmint meringues to the jazz tunes of the excellent saxophone and trumpet duo.

My final dinner took me to the resort’s most exotic restaurant, Ginger. Its Asian-inspired fusion cuisine stands out for the daring yet well-balanced combination of eastern and western culinary traditions. While enjoying one of the restaurant’s opulent cocktails appropriately served in tiki mugs, I browsed the menu looking for the more unusual dishes.

I opted for the smoked prawns (they were actually smoking when served) with pumpkin puree, wasabi crust, “chorizo” and sepia ink sponge, followed by the salmon tataki with karoshi su miso, ouzo and pickled radish. A stand-out dish were the steamed meat dumplings with gravy and teriyaki sauce, whereas the restaurant’s take of “surf 'n' turf" was the rather daring combination of a calamari roll with veal tartar, sepia ink ravioli filled with chicken and leek accompanied by a tomato-ginger-lemongrass sauce. Amazing!

Worth mentioning is the management’s decision to offer only Greek wine throughout the resort. The wine list focuses exclusively on meticulously curated wines from Rhodes, other Greek islands and the Greek mainland.

Food aficionados will also appreciate the cooking lessons with traditional Greek recipes given personally by the hotel’s executive chef every week.

The room and the spa
I stayed in one of the swim-up rooms in the Atlantica Imperial Residences, the hotel’s new wing. Everything here is of the highest quality and follows the minimal modern architecture blending with the rocks that the hotel has been built into. This part of the Atlantica Imperial is particularly quiet and serene and feels more like a private club than a busy holiday resort. It has a separate reception desk and breakfast room as well as its own indoor and outdoor pools.

The modernly styled room and bath are spacious and come with all expected creature comforts including high-tech touches and a pillow menu. The terrace doubles as a living room for lounging, taking in the sun, dining or dipping directly into the shared pool that runs along the façade of the building. 

A noteworthy manifestation of the hotel’s generosity towards its guests is the particularly rich in-room welcome treat. Besides the fruit basket, I enjoyed the contents of a gift-wrapped lacquerware bento box holding a variety of miniature sweets and bite-size pieces of fruit.

And then there was the spa… 

This beautifully appointed space offers all the facilities and treatments necessary for an unforgettable wellness experience. I had a look at the signature treatments and I opted for the cranial massage delightfully delivered by my therapist’s magic hands. 

Epilogue
Lesson learned! Great hospitality can be found in all types of hotels. The Atlantica Imperial Resort & Spa is the living proof that a hotel can excel in customer service and offer world-class cuisine in the context of mainstream tour operators and all-inclusive holidays. 

All it takes is the proper team dedicated to following high standards and to being creative. It is by no accident that the Atlantica Imperial succeeded in attracting a sophisticated clientele shunning mass-market holiday experiences and banal entertainment offerings, who are more than willing to give in to the hotel’s tempting culinary offerings and who value the serenity of this designated adults-only resort.

The brand of hospitality that the Atlantica Imperial stands for is as sophisticated as it gets and the resort’s cuisine is simply amazing! Overall an astonishing holiday experience and great value for money.

Would I have chosen this hotel for my vacation given my preconceptions? Probably not. Would I stay there again? Definitely yes!

News Editor - TravelDailyNews Media Network | + Posts

Tatiana is the news coordinator for TravelDailyNews Media Network (traveldailynews.gr, traveldailynews.com and traveldailynews.asia). Her role includes monitoring the hundreds of news sources of TravelDailyNews Media Network and skimming the most important according to our strategy.

She holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication & Mass Media from Panteion University of Political & Social Studies of Athens and she has been editor and editor-in-chief in various economic magazines and newspapers.

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