Avra Estiatorio Opens Greek Seafood Restaurant in Boston

Avra Estiatorio opened its doors in Boston’s Back Bay this spring, bringing charcoal-grilled Mediterranean fish and white tablecloths to the Lyrik development’s second floor.

The upscale Greek seafood chain already holds court in Beverly Hills, Miami, and New York City, and Boston is its latest bet. The new location sits above Rosa y Marigold, a Peruvian restaurant that opened around the same time, and the two-floor setup gives the Lyrik building serious dining weight. Avra’s room leans hard into the aesthetic: marble bar, faux olive trees in abundance, wing-like sculptural structures hanging overhead, and private dining rooms that can handle a rehearsal dinner or a corporate blowout without blinking.

The fish market is the room’s centerpiece. Whole fish rest on ice in a display near the kitchen, and diners are welcome to walk up, pick their specimen, and peer through the large window to watch the kitchen work. “Everybody wants to experience the fish market,” Avra cofounder Nick Tsoulous told Boston Magazine. For anyone who’d rather not leave the table, staff will bring a tray of options directly to you.

Expect imports.

Mediterranean varieties like tsipoura and lavraki show up alongside more familiar catches. The restaurant sources locally when it can, and Tsoulous said “we love [sourcing] locally, if available.” Once a fish is chosen, it gets grilled over charcoal, deboned, and finished with ladolemono, a straightforward Greek sauce of olive oil and lemon. That olive oil deserves its own sentence: it comes from a small family farm in the Peloponnese, it’s a first-harvest oil with a noticeably bolder flavor than later-harvest oils, and there’s a bottle sitting on every table.

The menu isn’t fish-only, though the 26-year-old restaurant group’s identity is built around what Tsoulous calls “Greek seafood with Mediterranean influence.” He recommends starting with a Greek salad built around Kalamata olives, feta, tomatoes, peppers, and onions, then moving to grilled octopus with caper and red wine vinaigrette. Raw fish comes next. The sashimi platter pulls together Faroe Island salmon, big eye tuna, and hamachi, while the lavraki ceviche gets a kick from jalapeño. Lobster pasta anchors the heartier section of the menu. Crispy zucchini and eggplant chips with tzatziki make a solid case for showing up early and ordering immediately.

Don’t skip dessert. The chocolate cake slices are, by the source material’s own admission, hilariously large. Coconut pie rounds out the options.

When warmer weather fully settles in, Avra will open terrace seating on Lyrik’s upper level, an outdoor perch above the Massachusetts Turnpike that manages to feel like an escape. The development, which sits in the Fenway/Kenmore area, has been filling in fast, and Avra’s arrival adds a destination-dining anchor that the neighborhood didn’t have before.

Greek seafood traditions run deep, and Avra’s format, whole fish chosen by the diner, grilled simply, finished with good oil and lemon, doesn’t try to reinvent anything. It just imports the approach to a city that already cares a lot about what’s on the plate. Boston has always taken its seafood seriously. Avra is counting on that.