Sottovento Naxos Restaurant — Restaurant in Municipality of Naxos and the Lesser Cyclades

Lovely location and a very nice place to sit and have dinner. I was surprised by some of the negative comments here about the staff, I thought they were all fine. I recall that the house wine was pretty decent as well. If we'd just gone for a few drinks, this would have been a very different review.

However, we were there for dinner, and unfortunately what I cannot recommend was the food. My family of four were there as my daughter fancied a change after all of the Greek food we'd had on the trip (which was all fantastic btw). Our meals were all really bad. The pizza was completely tasteless, the pork fillets were tough and covered with an unpleasant sauce (how can you get pork wrong in Greece??), my wife had a risotto that was grainy and undercooked with a nasty aftertaste, and I had a burger with Naxos gruyere which was, despite my asking for it rare-to-medium-rare, was cooked to death and dried up.

This was really surprising to us. If the food we'd eaten literally everywhere else in Naxos hadn't been quite so good then I might not have been moved to write this review, but this place stood out sharply as the only bad food of the whole holiday. Perhaps they just had a bad day in the kitchen, I don't know, but based on what we ate, I'd have to recommend that it is avoided. There are a lot of great places to eat nearby.

Also, not a complaint as such, but the tomato ketchup was strawberry jam. I don't mean to say it reminded us of strawberry jam, we all tried it and it was strawberry jam! I'm all for trying new things and I have no issue with strawberry jam, but we did want tomato ketchup. We asked for ketchup again and got jam again. [Disclaimer: if somehow it turns out that it genuinely wasn't strawberry jam, then I can only conclude that the fruit breeders of Naxos have managed to develop a tomato variety with exactly the same taste, smell, texture and processing characteristics as a...

Really bad service, the staff need to be more professional and pleasant. On the plus side, the bar has a good house wine, music and ambience. We came to the restaurant three days in a row as it was next to our hotel. Each time we were warned the restaurant/bar was closing at 11pm (first two times we came at around 9:30-10pm). I said we just wanted to get a drink, the first thing the staff said was to warn us about the 11pm closing time which didn't sound welcoming. Nothing like, of course, please sit anywhere you like, what would you like to drink... and then to maybe say if they must, please note we are closing at 11pm. Both the barman and the waitress looked like they didn't want to be there and couldn't wait to...

On our first full day in Naxos we went to the beach to see what it was like and decided to use Sottovento's beach club on the premise that we'd try some of the others if we decided we liked the beach enough. Needless to say, Sottovento was the only beach club we ever went to and we ended up going there on 6 of our 7 days on the island!

The sun loungers are very comfortable, the food and drinks are all excellent and reasonably priced and the atmosphere is one of pure relaxation.

A special shout out to Nik and Lefteris who were extremely attentive, welcoming and friendly and helped to make our time at Sottovento even more relaxing.

We will definitely be coming back here when we next...