Every family has its story. Ours starts with a boat.
It begins in the mountains of Greece, follows a boat up the Columbia River, and spends decades in the restaurants of Alaska. Then it comes back to this coast, and in June 2025 it arrives at Pier 12 in Astoria.
What Akres means
Άκρες
ÁK-res · edges — the plural of άκρη: an edge, a tip, the far end of something.
Two places at the edge.
Our village sits at one of them, a handful of houses on a mountainside on the Greek mainland, looking down at the water. This restaurant sits at another, at the end of a pier on the Columbia, where Oregon and the continent both run out.
We named the restaurant after the village because the two places feel the same to us. In both, you've gone as far as you can go, and the view is your reward.
Chapter 1
The village
Akres, Greece
Our story starts with Konstantinos Macheras, who grew up in Akres, a small mountain village above the sea on the Greek mainland. The way the family tells it, there wasn't much to do in Akres except work and look at the water, and he did plenty of both. By the time he was sixteen he had made up his mind to go to America.
Most of what we know about those years comes from the stories he told at the table and the dishes he cooked. The oldest of them is still on our dinner menu. It's the Olympia, a fish baked in a sauce the family has made since 1972.
Chapter 2
The river
Oregon, in his teens
He crossed the Atlantic as a teenager and came up the Columbia River by boat to Portland. We don't know the exact year.
From Portland he went to work in Oregon's logging camps, a Greek kid a long way from his village, learning English and a trade out in the rain and the timber. He stayed on this coast long enough to be photographed on it.
Konstantinos at Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach, 1970s.
He looks like a man who likes where he is.
Chapter 3
Alaska
Twelve restaurants in forty-three years
After Oregon came Alaska, and that's where he stayed, opening one restaurant after another. Pizza Paradisos was one of the early ones, in the early 1970s. Angelo's Trattoria in Kodiak came in about 2008, and in 2014 the Kodiak Daily Mirror counted his newest, Aquamarine Café, as his twelfth restaurant in forty-three years.
Pizza Paradisos. The print is stamped July 1973.
At his desk. Another photo from that album is labelled "Kostas Macheras, President."
That's him leaning on the Pizza Paradisos van, with "authentic European cuisine" and a Greek temple painted on the side.
Anna Maria Kaloumenou, Angelo's mother and our co-owner, worked alongside him through those years.
Some of what's on our menu tonight came out of those kitchens. The seafood did, because nobody runs restaurants in Kodiak for decades without learning what to do with what the boats bring in. So did the habit of putting Greek food on the menu in a place that hadn't asked for it.
Chapter 4
Back to the coast
Seaside summers · fall 2024
For years the family kept a second home in Seaside, Oregon, a short drive down the coast from here, and spent winters in Alaska and summers on the Oregon coast. That's a lot of water for one family, and nobody complained.
The coast kept pulling us back. In the fall of 2024 Angelo, Anna Maria and Samantha moved down from Alaska and started looking for the right room.
Chapter 5
Today
Pier 12 · since June 2025
We found it at the end of Pier 12, at the foot of 12th Street, and opened Akres on the Pier in June 2025. The restaurant was Angelo's idea, a son's way of honoring his father and everything he built. Angelo and Anna Maria own it. Samantha, Angelo's wife, runs the dining room and the bar, and the cocktails named for Greek myths are hers, the Underworld Manhattan, Hera's Mule and the Pom of Persephone among them.
Samantha, picking up an order at the kitchen window.
The cooking is what it has always been in this family, Greek and Mediterranean, made with whatever the Pacific Northwest hands us. That means salmon, clams, scallops and the fish on today's sheet. From Friday through Sunday we also cook the Greek specials, moussaka, giouvetsi, spanakopita and the Olympia, because those are the dishes we grew up on and the ones we'd want someone to make for us.
The bar.
Fish and chips, on its way out.
Two more for the dining room.
The mezze platter.
That's our story so far. Konstantinos spent his working life feeding people, and we'd like to do the same for you, so come and eat with us. If you'd like the longer version, ask at the table. Someone will have one, and there will be bread.
