FOOD, FOOD AND MORE FOOD!

What can I say? We love food and we love to try all kinds. Almost always, the first thing we look for is a small restaurant with authentic local food. We tried the Taverna recommended by our friend. It was good and not as expensive as the other restaurants. Then we remembered that our driver was pointing at a Taverna on the way to our hotel the first day. He said something like "best restaurant" so we went and searched for this place. It wasn't difficult to find. It was in a corner street of Plaka, decorated with Christmas lights and boy, was it crowded!

Last night, we went and tried the place, not knowing what's in store for us. We sat on a table next to the open kitchen and waited for the waiter to give us the menu. A rather older man came over and gave us a small folding type business card of the restaurant. We didn't look at it, put it away and waited. Immediately, a younger man came over and gave us the same card. We then realized it was the menu. A set menu listed on a small business card. Ooookay...

Then in halting English, he explained to us how it works. There is a menu for 2, 3, 4 etc number of people. You get a certain number of dishes plus drinks and bread. So, he pointed out that for a Menu of 2 we get to choose 5 dishes out of 18 (there is no list of such dishes), a half a liter of either red or white house wine, a basket of bread, a liter of bottled water and dessert. All for 24 Euros. Wow! That's the cheapest we've seen so far. After waiting for 3 minutes, a guy comes with a huge tray of assorted food. Traditional greek food.

I can already tell we are going to have fun with this so we chose familiar Greek food: dolmadas, some pork dish, Greek salad, fried calamares and another calamares in some red sauce. You just grab the dishes from the tray. Then the waiter comes back with the liter of water, the half liter of red wine (Matt's choice), basket of bread and plates. For dessert, they served us a small plate of something that looks like rice cake. I asked what's in it but our waiter Yanni didn't speak much English and couldn't say anything else but "special for you". Right. To make up for it, he came back with 2 small shot glass of ouzo--or something that smelled like ouzo. The dessert was fantastic. It tasted like ground walnut with espress and cinnamon.

We had such a great time we went back again for dinner this evening. And I finally took pictures. Here they are...