Stelios and Katina — Restaurant in Municipality of Kissamos

Stelios & Katina Restaurant was a rare find! And an extremely great rare find!!

After all day driving and spending time at the beaches and coast, we came upon the town of Kissamos. Both my husband and I were starving. We happened to pull over to look on GOOGLE and found we were close to Stelios & Katina. The reviews looked amazing but they were not open as of yet. GOOGLE stated they opened at 16:00. It was 15:45. We parked and decided to walk to the beach to pass time. As we passed by the entrance to the restaurant a man was entering. Turns out this is George. We asked to confirm the opening time and he said now! We felt bad as we knew they were still getting set up so we said we would go for a short walk and return so they didn’t have to feel pressured. How nice of him to offer to accommodate us early!

Sure enough, on our return right at 16:00, they opened and welcomed us in. We sat in the beautiful garden patio setting in the rear of the restaurant. George explained the menu and answered our questions. He was so kind and kept apologizing for his English. We laughed and said his English was a thousand times better than our Greek!!!!

We had a glass of house red wine. A very generous pour. I also had a lemonade which was a local Crete bottled drink.

My husband ordered the fresh catch which is priced per kg. George described the fish in detail, even how and where it was caught. He then said he would weigh it for full disclosure of the cost before my husband agreed to order it. This is something you don’t find often. Most places, especially if they know you are a tourist, just want to get the most money from you and move on. My husbands fish - Red Porgy - Fargi from Mediterranean @ .65kg - was cooked to perfection with the flesh very moist. It was served with greens and a platter - yes a platter size - of fried potatoes.

I’m vegetarian so we worked out a dish for me. I ordered the grilled veggies - an assortment of eggplant, zucchini, mushrooms, tomatoes, red & green bell peppers and yummy spices - and George offered to have the chef make me plain pasta to toss with my vegetables. (There was not a vegetarian pasta option so we created one!). With olive oil, garlic and freshly grated cheese this was incredible! The veggies were cooked perfectly and so flavorful. Pasta was perfectly cooked al dente.

Before my main, my husband and I shared the Stelios & Katina Salad. Oh my. So good. With lots of walnuts, figs, avocado, pomegranate, olives, red onion, bell peppers, cucumber, tomatoes, black sesame and Greek Mizithra cheese all tossed with lettuce and arugula! The taste from the blend of all these ingredients was spectacular. All of this is locally produced and at the highest quality. You can taste it!!

Be aware…the portions of all dishes are EXTREMELY LARGE!!! The salad could have easily fed four. My pasta (which I took home more than half) was enough to feed a family.

Service was prompt and friendly throughout our time there. Even as the seating filled with others guests.

To finish our amazing meal, George offered us the house cake as a free dessert along with a small carafe of Raki. Just a nice gesture and delicious.

All this food & drinks along with garlic bread came to only 74€. The fish was 39€ of that. This is an EXTREMELY fair price for the portion size, flavors and quality of all the dishes. We were able to make an entire meal from the leftovers for our next dinner. And we took the fish scrapes home to the feral cats that live near our stay in Stavros. So in actuality, all this food fed us twice along with 7 cats for 74€! That’s a real bargain, plus we made great memories at a fantastic traditional Cretan...

OK food, funny personal, terrible end service.

We went here after reading reviews for a good restaurant in Kissamos, this one seemed as one of the best places in Kissamos. Sadly though, this place did not deliver.

The food was alright, not bad, but not great either. We've had way better in crete. The tzatziki however, was the best we've ever had. That alone makes this a 2-star and not a 1-star. It was that delicious!

The staff seemed very energetic and entertaining, but this was more or less directed to only some tables and not all. So we felt a bit like outsiders.

The boss was also walking around, but mostly just talking to locals or guests who come there often.

There was one young lad who was head over heels, couldn't handle the pressure put on him by the boss and the other waiter. Was running around like a headless chicken forgetting our desert, tea and check. We don't blame the lad, but rather his superiors not stepping in when he can't handle the pressure. (he was doing 4x as much work as the other waiter)

It took about 40 minutes for our desert to arrive, which was good but again not great. We ordered tea along with dessert, which was forgotten. It took us another 15 minutes to get a hold of one of the waiters to get the tea.

When we wanted the check, it took us about 30 minutes to get a waiter come over, the young lad, but he totally forgot about it. Then for another 30 minutes no waiter was coming even close to us, we waved or signed quite often.

Finally the boss made his round and we were finally be able to get the check. Then again no one would come back for a while to receive our payment...

In total we've waited roughly 1.5 hours to leave the restaurant. I can't phantom how you can handle your customers that way...

At best this should get 3-stars in my opinion. The 5 stars you see on here is...

The staff was nice but there were a few things that made this our only “negative” food experience in Crete: no free tap water given (every other restaurant in Crete provided this automatically), no draft beer (the waiter said that it’s not really common to have draft beer in Crete but every other place had some :D I don’t care about beer but I found this interesting), DON’T ORDER THE SWORDFISH STEAK for 15€, it was the driest/toughest piece of fish/meat I’ve ever tasted, I couldn’t even chew it properly and had to spit it out :( sadly the fish soup was not available so we picked a random fish dish and I wished the waiter had recommended something else to us or had warned us that it would be this tough (we were scared to complain about it and silently tried to eat it as we don’t like throwing food away 😭), bread was automatically brought to our table and billed 2x, even though we didn’t ask for it and didn’t even eat half of it since it was hard (stale and not really as fresh as in other restaurants).

Positive things about this experience: MOUSSAKA WAS DELICIOUS, there were 3 stray cats!!! 😺, nice terrace & music.

We paid around 37€ in total and got a free dessert which was a bit underwhelming compared to other desserts we had...