kalipso — Restaurant in Municipality of Chania

We were stopped while walking along the water and ushered in by whom i assume to be the owner considering I've seen pictures of him from years and years ago. Let's talk about prices, we were charged 6€ for one bottle of water, and we got two, that's 12€ for WATER, which we were getting free of charge at every single other restaurant in the area. We were charged a 4€ service fee and on top of that didn't get what I had asked for. Let's talk about the food, three gyros were ordered, the restaurant didn't offer a lamb gyro, only chicken and pork, park was ordered and delivered, but the pork was way under expectations for the 18€ we paid. We also ordered a Kleftiko with lamb, the lamb was unflavorful and the best part of the dish was the fries (chips) provided on the side. This was extremely disappointing considering the 25€ price. Overall the experience was 2.3-3 stars up until the bill, when trying to pay the server told us that the card machine was down, (as always it would seem considering I've seen more than a handful of reviews saying the same thing) so he guided us to an atm one door over. (Very convenient) Our bill totalled at 180€ for 4 people with one starter for 3 out of the 4 and one meal each. Overall the 4 main dishes costed 75€, the starters were a total of 45€ and the rest was for other miscellaneous things like bread water service and tax. For reference we dined the night before at a restaurant around the corner and were charged 200€ for 8 people, each ordering a starter and a meal, with multiple drinks! TOURIST TRAP. READ REVIEWS. Don't fall for it like we did. Read for the prices, they are STEEP...

Typical tourist trap.... but a nice one!

That luring, tourist catching waiter dragged my wife into a lunch at their place. Honestly, I wanted another place, but it just happened.

An accident that turned out pretty good.

Their FISH SOUP was one of the best we had! Seriously. Out of many places, we visited at the west coast. Very intense flavours. Never imposing, nicely balanced. Also nice junks of fish and shrimp to round up a perfect package. A delight, you should not miss! The FRIED SNAILS were a challenge, I have to say. The worst I have had, ever. And we ate them a lot and with please all around France and wherever. They were fresh and properly cooked, I have to admit. But something was not quite right. Our son still ate them with pleasure .... because he still does not know how good ones taste. The SPAGHETTI BOLOGNESE, which I your have never ordered outside of Italy were the surprise if the day. Nice & tasty pasta, which I would have never expected. A bit more than al dente, but that's how I like them. Not too soft either. Just right. Smooths and lovely seasoned Bolognese sauce to round up the package. A winner combination, which I loved to eat, instead of our son who refused to have them. Nice PISTACHIO ICE-CREAM as a compliment rounded a quite nice experience up to 4 stars.

The waiter turned out to be a real nice guy, by the way. I charged him wrong at first sight and hopefully made it up while chit chatting and laughing while we were fooling around afterwards.

Stay away from the rosemary trenched snails and you will get a proper 5 star experience in this touristic...

This place is a SCAM! Do not go here. And don’t believe their good ratings. Most likely at some in the past this was a good and maybe great establishment. Explaining why it is so highly rated. But something happened in the end of 2023, and if you read comments after September 2023 almost ALL the ratings are bad and warnings not to go to this place. DON’T GO HERE! It’s sad to see as they have a great location. And from past reviews it was once a good place. But now they should be ashamed of what they are doing. And hope that someone will report them. I was very close to calling the police. According to Greek law all prices must be visible on all menus. We had seen a text that said so at another restaurant a few days prior. Somehow we were too naive to understand why this would be important to not... Until we came to shady Kalipso!!! We wanted to only order food for our kids so they brought us a kids menu that had product but no prices were able to read as they were completely smudged. My husband asked to see a “real” menu but was never given one. Part of the food was still frozen on the kids plates and the glass of fresh orange juice turned out to be some industrial manufactured juice from a can that cost 12 euro per serving!! And if you have read any of the comments in the past year you will see that there card reader isn’t working….do you wonder why? Smells like tax evasion. Maybe it would be time to call it a day and...