Dafni — Restaurant in Municipality of Rhodes

🍽️🍷🍺 There are many places to eat in Rodos old town, and like all popular tourist destinations you will generally just pick one and hope for the best, most of which will have people standing outside pulling you in promising a great meal at an amazing price, however after only a day or so you will find this is not always accurate, on both counts of price and taste.

However take a minute walk away from the busy main Street down some little side alleys, and you will find Dafni. An unassuming building, set back from the standard tourist route you would be forgiven to walk past, which would however be a mistake.

To make a restaurant such as this work, and to be as busy as it is you have to serve delicious food, give value for money, and have great customer service. To their great credit Dafni manage to do all three, and to a high level. You don't get to be so busy each night without this combination.

Dafni is primarily a seafood restaurant, but of course they also serve authentic Greek cuisine with the usual options of steak ect. I would however suggest if you are coming here then go with the seafood. Would you go to a steak house and order a salad? No. So don't come to the best seafood restaurant in Rodos and let yourself down!!!

We were warmly greeted, shown to our table in the outside courtyard area and ordered our drinks while we looked through the menu. Unsure of a starter option we were told of the specials, which included a tuna carpaccio. We went for this and I can't rate it highly enough. Fresh, seasoned well, and delicious.

For mains we went with the Dorado, and the Octopus. While both were once again cooked excellently, I did however find the baked potato in silver foil a little strange, a kind of step back to the 80s. This is a small gripe and one that could easily fixed with a little more imagination from the kitchen, but then again, if this has worked for them, then perhaps I am on my own with this.

After the main we were given a small orange cake which was a little sweet for my savoury taste, but a nice touch all the same.

Staff throughout the meal were friendly and always there on hand if we had any questions or just needed a top up.

Dafni rates on most sites there or there abouts in terms of best seafood restaurants in Rodos, and I for one would put it right at the top. Speak to your waiter and get some recommendations before making your choice, I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

Thanks for a lovely experience, we will be sure to return. ( Just lose the spud in...

We ordered the seafood risotto and the kleftiko.

TL;DR: We had some unfortunate experiences at the restaurant. However, the food is amazing, and the staff speak excellent English, so I have to still give them five stars.

They made a mistake, giving our order to someone who ordered after us, resulting in us waiting for the food for about an hour. Also, they seated us outside the restaurant, giving a seat in the restaurant at the same time to someone who came after us. We initially thought the seating would not be a problem, but it made it harder to communicate with the staff.

In spite of these things, which put quite a dampener on our moods before the food came to the table, the restaurant has to receive full marks from us. This should tell you how good the food is. The seafood risotto is possibly the best seafood I have eaten, and the kleftiko was very good. Additionally, the orange pie/cake we received on the house was really good, so good in fact, I'll have to recreate it at home, and I am not a dessert person at all.

I sincerely believe we were just unlucky with the experiences I noted above, and you would likely only have a positive experience if you went here! I think we will be back, even though we don't like going to the same restaurant...

Disappointing Experience Despite High Reviews

We visited this place last night after being drawn in by the high ratings on Google, but unfortunately, our experience didn’t live up to the hype.

I ordered the bacon cheeseburger, which came with a “house sauce” described as a mayo-style pink burger sauce. However, it was completely overwhelming there was so much of it that it oozed out of the burger with a single bite. It made the whole thing quite unpleasant, and I ended up scraping off a large amount enough to fill nearly half a side plate. That alone left me feeling a bit sick and really put me off the rest of the meal.

My partner had the moussaka, which looked promising at first since it wasn’t served in the usual small brown dish, but unfortunately, that’s where the positives ended. It had a thick layer of solidified white sauce on top, which had a strange texture and absolutely no flavour. Overall, it was just bland and disappointing.

On a positive note, the service was good the staff were attentive and friendly, so no complaints there. But as for the food, it was well below expectations, and we left feeling really let down. The glowing reviews didn’t reflect our...