Santorini has some excellent entertainment options, with some great Greek and international restaurants, lively nightlife and plenty of shopping. There is a small music scene, while there are also some festivals held in the summer season.
Eating out
As is true all over Greece, eating out is a way of life for the people of Santorini and the locals tend to spend long evenings in tavernas. Meals in Santorini are not to be rushed! The island has a varied selection of good value tavernas offering traditional Greek food as well as some more expensive restaurants. There is a wide range of cuisine on offer, with some especially good seafood. There are eateries dotted all over the island, with the biggest choices being in the major tourist centres. The most popular way to choose a restaurant is to take a pleasant stroll and find one where the food and ambience most suits you.
Local cuisine
Santorini cuisine is very close to typical Greek cooking, with a few local specialties. The most popular way to eat, especially in groups, is to order a mezedes, which is a huge range of cold and hot dishes meant for sharing. Mezedes normally starts with a selection of cold dishes including tzatziki (yoghurt and cucumber), taramasalata (cod roe dip), stuffed vine leaves and bread, and is typically followed with fish and grilled meat. Some delicious sweet Greek pastries with strong coffee is the perfect finale to such a meal.
Santorini specialities include dishes made with fava lentils, which can be eaten hot or cold and are often cooked with smoked pork. Santorinian Cloro cheese and tomato keftes (fried tomato and onion rissoles) are another local specialitie which must be tasted.
Theatre and music
The music scene here is focused on the islands nightclubs, with frequent guest appearances from internationally renowned DJs. There are also some more tranquil options, with many of the bars in Fira, Kamari and Oia playing soft jazz and classical music in a beautiful setting.
Santorini hosts an annual jazz festival every August. The festival began in 1997 and has attracted performers from across the world. The setting is outdoors at the open-air cinema in Kamari and the programme is an interesting mix of modern and traditional jazz. The island also hosts an international music festival in August and September as well as more traditional Greek cultural festivals.
There is an open-air cinetheatre in Fira that shows two films each evening (one at 21:00 and the other at 23:15), which are usually international films with Greek subtitles. Drinks and snacks are available for movie-goers.
Shopping
Shopping in Santorini is good, with jewellery, leather and woven goods, and folk art being some of the most popular local crafts. Shopping here is a fun experience, with many shops lining the small cobbled streets, ranging from cheap souvenir shops to very expensive high quality jewellery shops.
Fira is the main shopping centre on the island, but some of the beach resorts also have some good shopping potential. Oia in the north west of the island is great for art and fine ceramics, while Kamari Beach has an excellent selection of local craft shops. For camera film, batteries and international newspapers, head for the main square in Fira.
It has also become popular to buy a few bottles of the local wine. The island has a number of vineyards, which you can visit to taste some of the wine before deciding whether to buy. It is also possible to buy some local fava beans and the islands own tomato juice. It is said that the volcanic eruptions here throughout history have made the soil very fertile, and therefore any homegrown food has a wonderful taste.
New Greek cuisine with focus on organic, farm-direct produce and seafood from the Mediterranean. Overlooking the volcanic Caldera of Oia Santorini.
Since its establishment in 1987, in the village of Oia (Ia) Santorini, Papagalos Restaurant has defined contemporary Greek cuisine. Voted as one of the best of Santorini Restaurants and being amongst the top 50 Greek restaurants, Papagalos Restaurant will fulfil your expectations of a perfect gastronomic experience. With a focus on the freshest offerings of each season, Papagalos' Restaurant chefs allow the ingredients of the
This Santorini Restaurant Review Page is from the Simply Santorini website – an insiders guide to getting the most from Thira - the honeymoon island. Santorini hotels, resorts, romantic locations, beaches, history, sunsets & much more…
We'd love to hear from you and be able to share your experience with visitors to our site. We love eating out in Santorini and find it difficult to pinpoint our best restaurant in Santorini, the most romantic Greek Island.
We know that opinions are very subjective on this subject, but you are entitled to your opinion - so share it with us!
| Santorini Restaurants & Taverns : Eating Out |
| A guide to Santorini’s restaurants & tavernas. Traditional Santorini & Greek food with Recipes |
| Eating is a way of life for the Santorinians and for the Greeks in general. Restaurants are not a place to have a bite to eat before an evening of entertainment, eating out IS the entertainment. And whether you go to a local tavern or to a gourmet restaurant you will see that the Greeks take their time over food.
Traditional Santorinian dishes include the fava dip, a salad with cherry tomatoes with chloro cheese, the santorini cucumber 'Katsouni' and capers, tomatokeftedes (tomato rissoles), and the round fat baby courgettes grown locally. Favourite main courses are dishes of grilled meat, or seafood such as octopus, squid, red snappers and kalamari. Santorini also grows its own watermelon, which is small, dark in colour with lots of pips, and has an excellent taste. Santorinian wine by the bottle or barreled wine produced locally, raki or a light beer accompany the meal. No meal is complete without Greek pastries and thick strong coffee. Taverns are usually cheaper than restaurants - they offer simple but tasty dishes ... |
 |
| Santorini Restaurants & Tavernas |
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
| Traditional Santorini & Greek Food : History & Recipes |
|
|
|
With hundreds of several kinds of eateries including Greek, Italian, Chinese and Mexican restaurants, taverns, souvlaki shops, pizzerias, steak houses and hamburgers, to name only some, eating out in Santorini is a matter of taste and how much you can afford to pay.
The upmarket restaurants in Santorini are among the most expensive in the Greek islands but many of them are among the best in Greece. Don't be surprised if you have to pay twice as much for a kilo of first class fresh fish as you would pay in another not so cosmopolitan island in Greece. Of course, in another Greek island you won't have the unique views and scenery that restaurants on the rim of the Caldera in Santorini offer and that explains the high prices.
But that doesn't mean that all eateries and restaurants in Santorini are expensive, the visitor will find many good places with good quality food and service and more affordable prices.
Some of the most famous which are also amongst the top 50 restaurants in Greece are located at Santorini.
Koukoumavlos restaurant in Fira is one of them with very good Greek cuisine and local wines. Eating there you can have an amazing view to the Caldera.
The restaurant, 1800, located in Oia and is built in an old Captain's mansion and has great decoration and a small library. The restaurant offers gourmet cuisine with local and Mediterranean flavours, excellent wines and wonderful views to the Aegean.
In Oia as well you will find the restaurant Papagalos with its cuisine all prepared from local food and specialities with a fine gourmet touch.
For the ones that prefer something other then the upmarket restaurants in Santorini, there are many choices as well in Fira and Oia and other villages of Santorini.
Katinas fish tavern in Amoudi is a good choice for fresh grilled fish, another one is the tavern Scaramagas in Monolithos and the Nikolas restaurant in Fira with typical local Greek food.
In Firostefani, the tavern Akteon is another place with typical Greek cuisine with a local touch.
In Perissa and Kamari you will also find many restaurants and taverns along the beach with many of them having reasonable prices.
International restaurants in Santorini:
For Chinese cuisine you can try the China Restaurant in Fira. In Perissa you can try the Italian restaurant Artistico and in Perivolos another Italian the Svago restaurant. If you like Mexican cuisine try Senor Zorba in Pyrgos.
“With little white churches atop soaring cliffs, big blue skies and sunsets that will make you swoon, Santorini is the zenith of the Greek Islands holiday experience.”
Hugging an ancient volcanic crater, Santorini’s small but perfectly formed. There’s sensational scenery, oodles of history and enough nightlife to please the party crowd. And if you don’t mind your sand in a darker shade of grey - a legacy of the island’s volcanic past - there’s plenty of good beach life too. Not to mention all the usual watersports to get you off your sunbed. The centre of Santorini’s universe is Thira, a bright, white town which clings to the caldera rim, overlooking the azure bay. At first glance it’s a typical island capital, with quaint, white-washed houses tumbling down the cliff-side in terraces. But on closer inspection its cosmopolitan side jumps out at you, with shops, bars, hotels and restaurants packed into the web of streets and alleyways. Mind you, there are also some good museums, one of which houses an amazing 16-foot frieze of a prehistoric Aegean fleet of ships. Outside Thira, Santorini’s less developed and something of a rural idyll. Cultivated fields and vineyards are interspersed with cute little villages, and the interior, with its isolated churches and hilltop fortresses, is definitely worth exploring. Just make sure you’re back at the coast for the sunset. A nod to the solar god Helios is an essential daily ritual for all Santorini sun-worshippers.
The 'caldera' or crater that occupies the centre of the island is one of the world’s most dramatic and spectacular geological sights. Some theories state that Santorini was once part of the fabled lost continent of Atlantis - a fact which has provided inspiration to great many artists and writers. The black shining pebbles, the bizarre-looking land formations and the black, white and red sands all form to create unforgettable scenery. Santorini is home to one of the world’s most famous sunsets. As evening approaches couples head to the beautiful town of Oia to secure their own romantic candle-lit table and watch the brilliant sun sink beneath the shimmering Aegean Sea.