Psomoladea — Restaurant in Municipality of Kythira

First review, but I had to tell the collective: The Psomoladea alone is worth a trip to Kythira. It was the best food I had in Greece ever. (And I travel to Greece a lot. I have been to 17 different Islands, stayed in Athens and Thaloniki and I think I remember every single Taverna and every Restaurant I have ever eaten at because I am borg.)

We sat outside waiting for the full moon to rise (irrelevant) while we were handed the menu. I starred at it for minutes and wasn’t sure if the restaurant is for me (like I always feel with Neelix) because I am vegetarian and there was no vegetarian main course on display. No problem, I thought, I am not that hungry anyways, I‘ll just share a salad and have some cheese.

When I told the overwhelmingly nice waiter that I am vegetarian (no meat no fish) he rushed inside and came back with 3 suggestions from the Chef that he could prepare for me which were not on the menu. As soon as I heard the word Melitzanes I said yes, team Eggplant here. (Boyfriend had something meaty, I will not comply, told him to write his own review, will be probably five stars and a thumbs up…)

We were served an appetizer: Oliveoil with lemon, thyme, seasalt, red pepper and bread to soak it in with. All local products. The oil was so tasty, fruity, yet strong and in combination with the other ingredients it was the best advertising of what food experience was to come next.

Then we shared a baby spinach salad with caramelized hazelnuts, cranberries and slices of pear all coated with a creamy basil dressing sitting on top of a fried polenta nest. Being vegetarian i eat a lot of salads and, yes, I love to cook and like to experiment, but that salad offered something new to me. The combination of sweet and salty, the crunch of the nuts, the umami from the polenta and the tickeling basil twist in the dressing… Killer salad, please, you have to try it.

Yeah, and then the full moon rises and you are sitting in beautiful Avlemonas, in the midst of May, having buried your father just months before, after two years of pandemic with the war going on in the Ukraine, having a global wheatcrisis, climate collapse, and all of that, and you take a sip of white wine, and for a moment you feel good because that is what good food can do to you. It can beam you into a happy place even when the world is falling apart.

I felt like it couldn’t get any better, and then the Melitzanes arrived. Holy Chef, please put them on the menu for us vegetarians, you will be loved endlessly. They were filled with sautéed and caramelized onions, tomatoes and some cretan cheese, a Imam kind of thing but much better. If Imam was let’s say Warp 5, these Eggplants were Warp 9.9 = can’t go any faster. So rich of umami taste. Light sweetness of the onions, with a slight taste of red vine melting into the flesh of the eggplant. I was in vegetarian heaven. I felt like I was understood, like I was seen, like this restaurant knew exactly what I needed, what I liked, how my taste works…

I said, it was the best food I had in Greece ever, it might be, that you could cross out the word Greece from the sentence, it might have been the best food ever.

Thanks to the Motörhead and...

The flavors were wonderful but management needs to work on how it deals with a crisis: we had ordered lobster pasta (ie a pretty expensive dish of 150 eur) without roe, since there was an allergy involved, for 5 persons, and when it arrived the lobster was raw. We informed the staff which took the dish back apologizing (such things happen anyway). After some time they came back with a new dish, where the lobster was much smaller and they had sprinkled roe on top (to a table with a person allergic to roe!). In order to avoid further disturbance, we just pushed the roe to the side and started serving the pasta. At that moment, they let us know that the dish was actually destined for the table next to us, and they gave (admittedly with the consent of said table) the dish to them (mind you we had already taken some of the pasta and de-shelled some of the lobster) with our forks. As for us, they brought back the lobster we had returned, simply boiling the parts of the lobster that we had de-shelled and were raw (and not the shell, claws etc which remained raw). Since it was already far too late, we let it slide and just ate the cooked parts. The management “handled” the situation by offering desert on the house, a simply very poor reaction...

The restaurant is in Avlemonas, a beautiful village in Kythera. We went to Psomoladea as it looked lovely on the outside. It was a bit busy and we had to wait for half an hour before another customer felt sorry for us and gave us his menus. We sat in the back garden as there were no tables available at the front. It was extremely hot, even though there was an air conditioner which was not working properly. The food was disappointing at best. The menu is full of pretentious food, apparently from a chef that has tried too hard to recreate traditional Greek food. I am from Kythera and I can tell you that what they call 'Psomoladea', their signature traditional Kytherian salad, was just a Greek salad. We ordered the pork fillet and a pasta plate for mains. The pork was COVERED in sauce and black pepper grains, making it inedible, and the pasta completely tasteless. I am surprised at the reviews this place already has. If you are thinking of coming here, I hope you read the Greek...