Category: Memorable meals: Dining in Greece

Mykonos food and drink 2013: Where we ate

New this year, L’île Bistrot-Café at 3 Kampani Street quickly became our favourite hangout in Mykonos Town for a coffee, drink or light meal. This photo is from the L’île Bistrot-Café Facebook page.

Repeat and first-time visits: A short holiday on Mykonos this past spring gave us an opportunity to dine at eight different restaurants, including a brand-new café in Mykonos Town, four other spots we had never been to before, our favourite beach taverna, plus two places to which I was eager to pay repeat visits after being highly impressed with them last year.

If you have been a regular reader of the blog, you might recall my restaurant report for 2012, in which I recounted my good experiences at more than a dozen different places. I specifically noted that I didn’t have a single disappointing meal during that holiday, and found restaurant service, overall, to be quite good.

I was anxious to see how Mykonos restaurants would compare this year — and hopeful, of course, that we would enjoy every restaurant and meal.

Unfortunately, that didn’t quite happen.

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August 14, 2013
Mykonos food and drink 2013: The restaurants and bars travellers are talking about this summer

The acclaimed Nobu Matsuhisa Mykonos restaurant at the Belvedere Hotel (seen in this photo from the Belvedere’s Facebook page) has been celebrating its 10th anniversary this week. Click on the picture to view a full-size image.

Table talk: One of the most popular vacation destinations in Greece, Mykonos is renowned for beautiful beaches and dynamic summer nightlife. But even though the island boasts more than two dozen major beaches, plus scores of bars and nightclubs, choosing where to swim and party will be probably be a much easier task for visitors than deciding where to dine each day.

With over 200 restaurants ranging from takeout gyros and souvlaki shops to traditional Greek tavernas and high-end gourmet establishments offering a variety of international cuisines, Mykonos is a veritable gastronomic paradise. But with such a vast and diverse array of eateries, many tourists understandably feel daunted by the daily dining dilemma — where to go for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

In a series of posts over the next couple of weeks, I will tell you about the Mykonos restaurants and bars that have been getting the best buzz this summer. I have been monitoring social media and online travel sites since early spring, and have been gathering feedback from friends and acquaintances on the island as well as people who have travelled there this summer. I also chatted about restaurants with dozens of visitors and locals during my own visit to Mykonos in mid-May.

To kick off my Mykonos food and drink 2013 reports, here’s a list of the dining places in and close to Mykonos Town that people have been talking about the most. I will report on popular bars and the hottest beach area restaurants in separate, subsequent posts.

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July 14, 2013
What we can’t wait to eat in Greece next week …

A delicious Greek salad we enjoyed at Maria’s House restaurant in Kos Town

Feta fans: We will be arriving in Greece for our 2013 spring vacation in just a few days, reaching our first island destination around lunch time. And I can tell you right now what we’ll be ordering for lunch: Greek salad.

I make Greek salads often, but they never taste even just a fraction as good as the ones we eat in Greece. The ingredients simply can’t compare. The cucumbers sold at my neighbourhood grocery stores generally have no flavour, the green peppers are usually bitter, the tomatoes tend to be bland and mushy, the olives are sour and rubbery, and the over-salted feta typically has a spongy texture.

It’s a whole different story in Greece, where the vegetables are packed full of flavour and the olives and feta are divine. Just the thought of ordering a Greek salad in Greece practically makes my mouth water.

Can’t wait for our first lunch!

Maria’s House at 80 Averof Street in Kos Town. Maria’s was our best — and favourite — dining experience on Kos during our Dodecanese island hopping holiday in May 2010.

May 10, 2013
Step up to superb food & sublime sunsets at Kamara Café on Amorgos island

The open-air terrace at Kamara Café in Upper Potamos is a great spot to view the amazing scenery while enjoying some of the café’s delicious Greek cuisine

The café also has lounge areas on its terrace, for those who just want to sit back and relax with a glass of wine while watching a spectacular sunset

This was one of the sunsets we watched from the Kamara Café. Here, the sun looks like an enormous white orb as it slowly descends behind Naxos island.

You’re guaranteed to work up a hearty appetite and thirst on your way to the restaurant — It’s a half-hour walk from Egali, up hundreds of steps like these.

Steps, stews and sunsets: When I was planning our trip to Amorgos in 2009, I asked an acquaintance in Athens for restaurant recommendations. We absolutely had to go to Kamara Café in Ano Potamos village, she said, and order the patatato — a goat and potato stew that is one of the island’s signature local dishes. Her other tip: allow plenty of time to walk up the mountain to the taverna, so we wouldn’t miss seeing the sunset if we got lost or delayed en route. “You won’t believe the view! The sunset — fabulous! And make sure you try the goat!” she gushed.

I put Kamara Café on my “must try” list, thinking that would nicely take care of dinner plans for one of the four nights we would spend on Amorgos. That list was in my luggage, in our room at the Yperia Hotel in Egali, while we were out exploring during our first day on the island. We spent the entire afternoon in and around Egali, wandering around the town, the beach, and some of the hiking trails in the area, as well as scoping out places where we might like to have dinner that night. Several spots near the beach and in the center of the town caught our eye, but since I didn’t have my restaurant list with me, I couldn’t remember if any were among the specific places that friends had highly recommended. Nevertheless, since we would probably be “walked out” by the end of the day, we were happy to see we would be spoiled for choice within a short stroll of our hotel.

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March 29, 2013
Greek holiday pic of the day

A yummy Greek salad and an ice-cold bottle of Mythos beer

Favourite snack: When I was grocery shopping one day last week, I got a sudden craving for a crisp Greek salad — our favourite lunchtime “snack” and dinnertime starter when we’re in Greece. So I picked up some feta, cucumber, olives, green peppers, tomatoes and a red onion. The salad I assembled back home looked appetizing enough, but was a huge disappointment to eat. The vegetables were crunchy but bitter (the onion actually gave me severe heartburn), while the tomatoes were tasteless and had the texture of soggy cardboard. The feta felt almost spongy, and had a sharp, slightly sour flavour, while the olives also seemed spongy, and tasted bitter and salty. Major letdown!

I should have known better — the taste and texture of our vegetables, even at the best of times, is never even remotely comparable to their flavour-packed counterparts in Greece. And now that we’re heading into winter, our vegetables will be even more dreadful. So no more Greek salads until next spring. With luck, we’ll make it back to Greece at that time … and if we do, you can be certain we’ll enjoy an authentic, tasty Greek salad with nearly every meal.

Until then, I’ll try to satisfy my cravings by pretending I’m back at Taverna Glafkos in Naoussa, on Paros, enjoying the delicious Greek salad pictured above that I enjoyed for lunch one day last May.

November 15, 2012
Memorable meals: Our matsata & meatball lunch at Irene’s cozy grocery-café on Folegandros

The unassuming exterior of Irene’s kafepantopoleio (café and grocery store) on the road that winds through Ano Meria village on charming Folegandros island

The small inside space doubles as a convenience store and restaurant

Famous food: You probably wouldn’t expect a convenience store to dish up some of the most delicious home-made pasta you’ve ever tasted, but then you probably haven’t been to Irene’s kafepantopoleio on Folegrandros, either.

I had never heard of Irene’s grocery-café until I read Greece’s Best-Kept Secret (Until Now), the cover story on Folegandros in the December 2004 edition of Condé Nast Traveler magazine. Writer Adam Sachs described celebrating his second wedding anniversary at Irene’s with a dinner meal of matsata — a local pasta traditionally served with rooster. “Irene made the matsata in our presence,” he wrote, “and as hoped for, it was a rich, gooey pleasure. It was cut into ribbons, and the texture was somewhere between a noodle and a dumpling. The rooster broth was poured over the matsata, the legs and breasts served on another plate.” The filling meal was followed by a dessert of “homemade goat’s-milk rice pudding with flecks of orange zest.”

I clipped the article and filed it away, not expecting that we would wind up visiting Folegandros three years later.

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June 23, 2012
In photos: Mykonos restaurants and bars 2012

There are more than 260 photos in the album, Mykonos 2012: Restaurants & Bars, which I have posted on the mygreecetravelblog.com Facebook page.

June 12, 2012
Top 6 memories of my Mykonos holiday in 2012 … #3: Over a dozen delectable dining experiences

Seaside tables at Alefkandra Taverna in Mykonos Town’s Little Venice district

Restaurant roundup: Last month, I posted an extensive report about restaurants in the TripAdvisor.com Mykonos forum. What follows below is a slightly edited version of the same report, with photos.

This is a description of restaurants that I personally dined at, took a look at, or heard about while visiting Mykonos for 8 days in May. My list isn’t intended to be exhaustive by any means; in fact, there are dozens of additional restaurants on the island that I didn’t get the opportunity to visit, so there are plenty of places popular with other Mykonos regulars that aren’t even mentioned in my remarks. If I’d had a longer holiday (and more money), I would have been able to review more restaurants!

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June 12, 2012