To Θαλασσάκι — Restaurant in Municipality of Tinos

Great location. Reasonable service. Overpriced, average, food.

I’d read the mixed reviews of this restaurant with some disbelief. It looks so good! So professional! Surely the negative reviews were due to a one-off bad experience, or an overreaction to the - relative to the island average - high prices?

However, there is truth in the mixed reception. The €12 headline salad was.. quite nice. A plate of soft cheese utterly tasteless bar the adorning fruits. Perhaps that is the point, but… Most tellingly, the potato fries at €6 each were desperately disappointing. We’d eaten fresh, soft yet crispy, amazing, fries at a tavern in Ysternia village only the night before which made for a stern comparison. These were like crumbly breadsticks the shade of autumn leaves. The basic meatballs and pasta were quite good. And $18.

However, you can’t argue with the location, and perhaps the fish dishes are really something else… but if the delivery of food staples is any marker, I’d not be risking €20-30 to find out. And the price really is the thing, not because this is expensive by standards of top European restaurants, but because there is so much great food, better food, available within 2km that is between half to two thirds the price and, yes, tastes better, be it simpler or more honest.

I’m not saying don’t eat here, the location is amazing and the food is fine. Fine. Maybe you’ll have a better experience. But I am saying that the mixed reviews might. not be a one off experience. Or, generously, a series of one offs, that the more pattern-minded might...

This is a truly fantastic place that puts to shame other more pretentious ‘fine dining’ restaurants on Tinos with its stunning cuisine, dreamy setting and just wonderful people!

This is not your bog standard seafront taverna, so don’t expect cheap eats - but prices are really very reasonable for what you get. The menu is ambitious and imaginative, executed to perfection, with emphasis on freshness of ingredients and precision of flavours, not gratuitous innovation. The portions are generous. The wine list is not large but excellent, with some real gems we didn’t find anywhere else. The service is flawless - confident, competent and unobtrusive. And you are sitting level with the sea, having to lift your feet occasionally if big waves crash from the odd ship passing, listening to wonderfully discrete & low-volume lounge music, with equally well-calibrated lighting....

The location is great, but the food is average and the service pretty terrible. There is no wine menu in English and the Greek menu is in the table cover so only one person can see either the drink or food menu. We got the fish soup and anchovies that were very good. We also got the grilled anthotyro which was a pretty average with no flavors. For main I got pasta with shrimps, but the shrimps were over cooked,soft and hard to clean. Pasta was ok, a little bit too salty for my liking. Their white wine selection is very limited but all of them being local. They have a lot of Assrtiko wines but the ones we tried were bad and much worse than the typical Assyrtiko like Domain Sigalas. All in all, in my opinion the food & service doesn’t justify the high price you pay. Only positive is the location but I...