Can vegetarians and vegans eat well in Santorini?

Exceptionally. Most traditional cooking here is vegetable-based, and Orthodox fasting traditions mean vegan requests are well understood.

Is a Santorini food tour worth booking?

If it goes inland, includes producers and provides transport, yes. If it stays on the caldera rim it is a restaurant crawl with a view.

Santorini Food: What to Eat, Where, and Why It Differs

Greek Food No1 in the World: Discover Greek Flavors on a Private Food Tour in Santorini

Compare this against our other Santorini island tours to find the right fit.
In an exciting announcement by TasteAtlas for 2025, Greek food has officially claimed the top spot as the best cuisine in the world, with an impressive rating of 4.60. Beating out Italy, Mexico, Spain, and France, Greece’s culinary tradition is now in the global spotlight. And there is no better place to experience the best of Greek food than Santorini, a stunning island known for its breathtaking views, volcanic wines, and authentic local dishes.

If you’re planning a trip to Greece this year, treat your palate to the vibrant flavors of the Aegean on a Santorini tour that combines gastronomy, culture, and spectacular scenery.

Why Greek Food Stands Out Globally

Greek food has earned its international acclaim for a reason. Its foundation lies in simplicity, freshness, and a strong connection to the Mediterranean diet. Olive oil, fresh vegetables, herbs like oregano and thyme, grilled meats, and world-class cheeses form the backbone of traditional Greek meals.

But it’s more than just ingredients—it’s a culinary philosophy centered around hospitality, seasonal produce, and dishes passed down through generations. Whether you’re enjoying a plate of moussaka, grilled octopus by the sea, or a classic Greek salad, there’s always a sense of warmth and connection behind every bite.

Experience Authentic Greek Flavors with Santorini Impressive Tours

To truly understand Greek cuisine, you have to taste it where it’s made best—on the islands, among locals, and with the Aegean breeze around you. Here are three highly recommended Greek food-focused tours in Santorini that will immerse you in the flavors that earned Greece the No1 ranking in the world:

1. Santorini Private Impressive Tour with Local Snacks at Black Sand Beach

This tour is the perfect introduction to Santorini’s charm. You’ll enjoy local snacks at the island’s famous black sand beach as you explore iconic landmarks, including traditional villages and panoramic caldera views. Expect to sample fresh bread, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and locally produced cheese—all staples of the Greek diet.

2. Santorini Private Tour and Food Experience

For a deep dive into the culinary heart of the island, this tour is unmatched. You’ll visit traditional settlements, experience Greek hospitality firsthand, and enjoy a carefully curated menu of Cycladic flavors. Think fava (yellow split pea puree), tomato fritters, and lamb slow-cooked with herbs—recipes that define the island’s rustic Greek food.

Whether you’re a foodie or a curious traveler, this food experience tour is a perfect way to understand what makes Greek food truly special.

3. Santorini Private Wine Tours

No discussion of Greek food is complete without its wines, and Santorini is a star in this area. With volcanic soil and centuries-old winemaking traditions, the island produces some of the most unique wines in the world, especially Assyrtiko.

This wine tour allows you to taste exceptional wines at hand-picked wineries while learning about the island’s viticultural history. Many tastings are paired with cheese, olives, or local meze, elevating the experience to a full gastronomic journey.

Why Book a Greek Food Tour in Santorini in 2025?

With Greek food now officially ranked as the best in the world, there has never been a better time to book a gastronomic journey in Santorini. Here’s why:

Greece is trending globally. Capitalize on the buzz while discovering the country’s culinary soul.
Local experiences matter. These private tours offer more than sightseeing—they’re about creating memories through food.
Tailored for every traveler. Whether you’re a foodie, a culture lover, or simply seeking an unforgettable trip, these Santorini private tours are curated to suit your pace and interests.

How to Use This Culinary Recognition for Your Travel Planning

Book early: With Greece topping global cuisine charts, demand for Greek food tours will increase.
Share your experience: After your Santorini tour, leave a review and tag photos with #GreekFood or #SantoriniFoodTour to inspire others.

Taste the World’s Best Cuisine Where It All Comes to Life

Santorini isn’t just a postcard-perfect island—it’s a gateway to the best Greek food experience you can have in 2025. With Greece recognized as the top culinary destination in the world, there’s no better way to celebrate than by booking a private food or wine tour on the island.

Whether you are sampling meze by the sea, sipping volcanic wine under the sun, or learning about age-old recipes in a traditional taverna, Santorini offers an unforgettable journey into the flavors that earned Greek food its crown.

Book your Santorini food tour now and taste why Greek food is No1 in the world.

Book Now Santorini Impressive Tours:

The Santorini Food You Should Actually Order

Santorini food is not generic Greek food with a caldera view. The island grows a small group of crops that exist almost nowhere else, because there is virtually no rainfall and the soil is volcanic ash, and those crops are the whole basis of the local kitchen. Order them and you eat something you cannot get in Athens.

Fava

The signature dish and the one to order first. Santorini fava is made from Lathyrus clymenum, a yellow split legume with PDO protection, grown here for thousands of years. It is boiled to a purÃ©e, served warm with olive oil, raw onion, capers and lemon, and it tastes nothing like the broad-bean fava served elsewhere in Greece. Some tavernas serve it pantremeni, “married”, with caramelised onions and sometimes octopus.

Tomatokeftedes

Fritters made from the island’s small tomato, mixed with onion, mint and flour and fried. The Santorini tomato is tiny, intensely concentrated and low in water because the plant survives on night humidity rather than rain. It is the second pillar of Santorini food after fava.

White aubergine

A local variety that is genuinely white, sweeter and far less bitter than the purple aubergine, with fewer seeds. Served grilled, in melitzanosalata, or fried. Increasingly rare and worth ordering when you see it.

Chloro cheese

A fresh, soft, slightly sour goat’s cheese made only on Santorini, traditionally served with tomatokeftedes or on its own with oil. Short season and small production, so it is not always available.

Capers and caper leaves

Caper bushes grow wild out of the volcanic rock. The buds are pickled as you would expect; the leaves are also pickled and used as a salad green, which is unusual and very much a Santorini food habit rather than a Greek one.

Brandada

A local salt cod preparation, creamy and garlicky, a survival from the days when preserved fish was the only fish the interior villages saw.

Sfougato

A baked dish of courgette, cheese and egg, closer to a savoury cake than an omelette. Home cooking rather than restaurant cooking.

Koufeto

White marrow slow-cooked in honey with almonds, traditionally served at weddings. One of the older sweets in Santorini food and now hard to find outside village bakeries.

Melitini

Small sweet cheese pastries flavoured with mastic, made at Easter. If you are here in spring, ask.

Fresh fish and seafood

Ammoudi below Oia and Vlychada marina are where the fishing boats land. Order by weight, ask the price before it is cooked, and expect it to be the most expensive thing on the table. Grilled octopus, marinated anchovies and whatever is on the ice that day.

The Wine That Goes With It

No account of Santorini food works without the wine, because they evolved together on the same waterless ground.

Assyrtiko is the principal white: bone dry, high in acid, mineral and saline, and unusual among warm-climate whites in holding its acidity through extreme heat. It is one of the great food wines of the Mediterranean and it was effectively made for fava, capers and grilled fish.

Nykteri is a fuller, richer style of Assyrtiko, traditionally night-harvested, often barrel-aged, and a better match for the heavier dishes.

Vinsanto is the sweet wine, made from grapes sun-dried on mats for up to two weeks then aged for years in oak. Served with dessert or on its own, and one of the oldest continuously produced wines in Europe.

Mavrotragano and Mandilaria are the indigenous reds, the former rescued from near-extinction and now genuinely sought after.

The vines are trained into kouloura, a coiled basket on the ground that shields the fruit from the meltemi, shades it from the sun and traps night humidity, which is the vineyard’s only water. Many are ungrafted and well over a century old. Our wine tour covers three estates with a driver.

Where to Eat: The Rule That Matters

The single most useful thing anyone can tell you about Santorini food is that the caldera rim sells the view and the interior sells the cooking.

Restaurants in Oia, Imerovigli and the Fira rim charge a substantial premium for a west-facing table, and many of them cook well. But the tavernas of Pyrgos, Megalochori, Emporio, Vothonas and Exo Gonia serve the same island produce at a fraction of the price, to a room that includes locals, and they are where the food itself is best.

The practical approach: book one caldera-view dinner for the occasion, and eat everything else inland or at the fishing harbours. Guests who do this report better meals and a smaller bill.

Ammoudi and Vlychada for fish, straight off the boats. Kamari and Perissa for relaxed beachfront eating with children. Fira for the widest choice at every price point. Megalochori and Pyrgos for the best Santorini food of the trip.

Why Santorini Food Tastes Different

Everything distinctive about Santorini food comes from one fact: the island has almost no fresh water. There is no natural spring, rainfall is negligible between April and October, and everything drunk here is desalinated or shipped in. Agriculture on such an island should be impossible.

What made it possible is the volcanic soil. The eruption laid down a deep layer of porous ash and pumice called aspa, which absorbs moisture from the night air and holds it against the roots through the day. Plants here drink fog rather than rain.

The consequences run right through Santorini food. Fruit is small, because the plant cannot afford water in it. Flavour is concentrated, because what would be diluted elsewhere is not diluted here. Sugars and acids are both high. The tomato is the clearest example: a Santorini tomato is a fraction of the size of a commercial one and several times as intense, which is why it works as a fritter and would be wasted in a salad.

The same logic explains the vines coiled into baskets on the ground, the ungrafted century-old rootstock that phylloxera never reached because the sandy volcanic soil will not host it, and the fact that the island’s white wine has the acidity of a much cooler climate.

It also explains the scarcity. Vineyard and farmland area on Santorini has been shrinking for decades as development takes the flat ground, and several of the crops behind traditional Santorini food are grown in genuinely small quantities now. Buying them at source is one of the few direct ways a visitor keeps them in production.

A Short History of Santorini Food

The excavations at Akrotiri found storage jars of pulses, evidence of olive oil and wine, and frescoes of saffron gathering, which places organised agriculture here well before 1600 BC. The eruption ended that society and buried the fields, and the ash it left behind is what makes the modern crops possible.

For most of the last five hundred years the island exported wine rather than tourism. Santorini’s barrels went to the Black Sea, to Russia and to the Orthodox churches of eastern Europe, and the captains’ mansions in Megalochori and Karterados were built on that trade. Vinsanto is the surviving product of it.

The land dishes come from poverty rather than plenty. Fava, split peas, capers gathered off rocks, salt cod, marrow in honey, cheese made in small quantity from goats: this is subsistence cooking on a dry island, and that austerity is precisely why Santorini food has the character it does.

Tourism arrived properly in the 1970s. It brought money and it also brought imported produce, and a great deal of what is sold as Santorini food today is grown elsewhere. The estates, the village tavernas and a handful of producers are what keep the real thing going.

How to Eat Well Here

When do Greeks eat?

Lunch from two, dinner from nine. Tavernas open earlier for visitors, but a taverna that is full at seven is full of tourists and a taverna that fills at ten is not.

How do you order fish?

By weight, from the ice, with the price agreed before it is cooked. This is normal and nobody will be offended.

Should you book?

For any caldera-view table in season, weeks ahead. For inland tavernas, rarely.

Is the tap water safe?

It is desalinated and generally not drunk. Bottled water is universal and cheap.

What about tipping?

Appreciated rather than expected. Rounding up is normal; ten per cent is generous.

Is bread charged for?

Yes, as a small cover charge. This is standard across Greece and is not a scam.

What is the raki at the end?

A complimentary digestif, usually with a small dessert. Accepting it is polite.

Are menus in English?

Almost everywhere. The tavernas where they are not are usually the ones worth eating in.

Can you eat well as a vegetarian?

Exceptionally. Most of the traditional Santorini food is vegetable-based by necessity, and Orthodox fasting traditions mean vegan cooking is well understood.

What about allergies?

Manageable, though nut and sesame use is common in sweets and gluten in most starters. Say so clearly when ordering.

What to Buy and Take Home

Wine, at the estate. Cellar-door prices beat retail in Fira, the range is wider, and older vintages that never reach shops are frequently available. Most wineries pack for hold luggage and several ship internationally.

Vinsanto in particular, because it barely exists outside the island.

Dried fava, which is light, cheap, keeps indefinitely and is the one ingredient that lets you cook Santorini food at home.

Capers and caper leaves in brine or salt.

Tomato paste from the island’s tomatoes, sold in small jars.

Thyme honey and mastic products from the village shops rather than the airport.

Check your customs allowance before committing to a case of wine. EU travellers have generous limits; travellers to the US, UK and Australia considerably less.

What a Santorini Food Tour Should Include

Food tours here vary widely and the label covers several different products. Before booking, check five things.

Does it go inland? A Santorini food tour that stays on the caldera rim is a restaurant crawl with a view, not a food tour.

Does it include producers? A winery, a farm, a bakery or a cheese producer is what separates a food tour from lunch.

Is it private or shared? Group size changes the experience considerably in small village kitchens.

Is transport included? The producers are not on a bus route and parking in the villages is limited.

Is it per person or per vehicle? Ours is per vehicle, which for a family or a group of four is a substantial difference.

Our private tour and food experience pairs the villages with the island’s produce, and the wine tour covers three estates with a driver so nobody has to abstain.

Where to Eat, Area by Area

Santorini food changes character completely depending on which part of the island you are standing in, and the price changes with it. This is what each area is actually for.

Oia

The highest prices on the island and some genuinely excellent kitchens among them. Almost every table is sold on the view, and the good cooking is found slightly back from the rim rather than on it. Book weeks ahead in season. Ammoudi below is a different proposition entirely.

Ammoudi Bay

Fish tavernas at the waterline, three hundred steps below Oia, where the boats land. This is the best fish on the island and among the best Santorini food full stop. Order by weight, sit close enough to the water to get splashed, and factor in the climb back.

Fira

The widest choice at every price point, from gyros counters to serious restaurants. The caldera-edge places charge for position; two streets inland the same money buys considerably more. Fira is also where you will find late-night food, which barely exists elsewhere.

Firostefani and Imerovigli

Quieter versions of the Fira rim, with several strong restaurants and slightly lower prices for the same caldera. Imerovigli in particular has a handful of kitchens that locals rate.

Pyrgos

One of the two best villages on the island for Santorini food. Tavernas around the square and up through the kasteli, serving island produce to a room that includes residents, at inland prices. Go for lunch and stay for the light on the stone.

Megalochori

The other one. A small village with a disproportionate number of good kitchens, two significant wineries nearby, and the sort of evening that people remember longer than the caldera dinner they paid four times as much for.

Emporio and Exo Gonia

Village cooking with almost no visitors. Exo Gonia has a well-known taverna with a terrace looking east and the Art Space winery a few minutes away.

Vothonas and Karterados

Ravine villages minutes from Fira with unpretentious tavernas and the Wine Museum nearby. Good for a first or last night when you are near the airport.

Kamari and Perissa

Beachfront eating, relaxed, child-friendly and mid-priced. The promenade at Kamari has the most consistent standard; Perissa is cheaper and more casual. Both serve earlier than the villages, which matters with children.

Perivolos

Beach clubs with kitchens rather than tavernas. Good for a long lunch that turns into an afternoon.

Vlychada

A small marina with two or three fish tavernas that Santorini residents drive across the island for. Among the least touristed Santorini food on the map.

Akrotiri

A handful of tavernas above the archaeological site, and the lighthouse restaurant at the very tip of the peninsula, which is a spectacular and expensive sunset proposition.

Eating Through the Day

Breakfast

Not a large Greek tradition. Hotels do buffets; villages do a bakery. Look for koulouri (sesame bread rings), bougatsa (semolina custard in filo), tiropita and spanakopita. Greek coffee is served small, strong and unfiltered, and freddo espresso is what everyone actually drinks in summer.

Lunch

The main meal traditionally, from around two. This is the best-value window in Santorini food: many tavernas run a fuller kitchen at lunch and prices are lower than at dinner for the same dishes.

The afternoon

Coffee, and a great deal of it. CafÃ©s fill between five and seven with people who are not eating.

Dinner

From nine for Greeks, from seven for everyone else. Meze-style ordering — several small dishes for the table rather than a plate each — is normal and is the right way to eat Santorini food, because it lets you cover fava, tomatokeftedes, chloro and a fish between two people.

Late

Gyros and souvlaki in Fira, and very little else on the island after midnight.

What to Drink Besides Wine

Ouzo. Anise spirit, served with water and ice which turns it cloudy, and always with food rather than alone.

Tsipouro and raki. Grape-pomace spirits, usually offered free at the end of a meal.

Greek coffee. Ground fine, boiled in a briki, served with the grounds settled. Order it metrios unless you like it very sweet or very bitter.

Frappe and freddo. The national summer drinks. Freddo espresso and freddo cappuccino are what you will see on every table.

Beer. Greek microbreweries have grown enormously, and there is a Santorini brewery producing the Yellow Donkey range.

Soumada. An almond cordial, non-alcoholic and traditional.

Santorini Food Through the Year

Spring. Wild greens, artichokes, fresh chloro cheese, lamb at Easter and melitini pastries. The best season for vegetables and the one almost nobody visits for.

Early summer. The first tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and their flowers. Fish is good before the heat peaks.

August. Tomatoes at their most intense, the wine harvest beginning, and every kitchen at full stretch. Book everything.

Autumn. The best month for Santorini food overall. Harvest is in, the sea is warm, the produce is at its peak and the restaurants are no longer overwhelmed.

Winter. Pulses, preserved foods, slow cooking, and the tavernas that stay open serving mostly locals. Prices drop and quality frequently rises.

The Wider Greek Menu, as Eaten on Santorini

Alongside the island’s own specialities you will meet the standard Greek repertoire. Knowing what is what makes ordering Santorini food considerably easier.

To start

Tzatziki — yoghurt, cucumber, garlic. Melitzanosalata — aubergine dip, made here with the white variety. Taramosalata — cured roe. Tirokafteri — spicy whipped feta. Dolmades — stuffed vine leaves. Saganaki — fried cheese. Kolokithokeftedes — courgette fritters, the cousin of the tomato ones.

Salads

Horiatiki is the real Greek salad: tomato, cucumber, onion, pepper, olives and a slab of feta, no lettuce. On Santorini it is frequently made with the island tomato and capers, which improves it considerably. Dakos is a Cretan import of barley rusk, tomato and cheese that has settled here.

Mains

Moussaka — aubergine, mince and bÃ©chamel. Pastitsio — the pasta version. Souvlaki and gyros — skewered and spit-roasted meat, the cheapest good food on the island. Kleftiko — slow-cooked lamb. Stifado — beef and onion stew. Gemista — stuffed tomatoes and peppers, and worth ordering here for the tomatoes alone. Briam — roasted vegetables.

Fish

Grilled octopus hung to dry outside the taverna. Gavros and sardeles — anchovies and sardines, marinated or fried, cheap and excellent. Kalamari, fresh rather than frozen if you are lucky. Whole fish by weight, whatever the boats brought in.

Sweets

Baklava, galaktoboureko (semolina custard in filo), loukoumades (honey doughnuts), karidopita (walnut cake), and Greek yoghurt with thyme honey, which is the best simple dessert in the country.

Greek Cuisine Ranked First in the World

Greek food topped the global cuisine rankings compiled by TasteAtlas, ahead of Italy and Japan, which put a great deal of international attention on exactly the sort of cooking this island does.

Rankings of this kind are inherently arguable, and it is worth being honest about what they measure: aggregated user ratings of individual dishes, not a judgement about which country cooks best. What the result does capture is real, though. Greek cooking is built on very few ingredients treated well — olive oil, tomatoes, pulses, cheese, herbs, fish — and that is exactly the sort of food that rates highly when people vote dish by dish.

Santorini food is a concentrated version of the same logic. A dry volcanic island with no water and thin soil produced a kitchen with almost nothing in it, and the result is a handful of dishes that taste of one thing each, very strongly. Fava is split peas, oil and onion. Tomatokeftedes are tomatoes, mint and flour. There is nowhere to hide in either.

Three Ways to Eat Your Way Around Santorini

One day

Bakery breakfast in your village. A long lunch at a taverna in Pyrgos or Megalochori. A winery in the late afternoon for Assyrtiko and Vinsanto with something to eat alongside. Fish at Ammoudi or Vlychada for dinner. That single day covers most of what matters about Santorini food.

Three days

Day one inland: Pyrgos, Megalochori, a winery, and a village dinner. Day two coastal: beachfront lunch at Kamari or Perissa, fish at Vlychada in the evening. Day three the occasion: a caldera-view dinner in Oia or Imerovigli, booked well ahead, preceded by Ammoudi at the bottom of the steps for lunch.

A week

Add a producer visit, a second winery, a cooking class if you want one, Exo Gonia and Emporio for the villages nobody eats in, the Wine Museum at Vothonas on a windy afternoon, and one deliberately unremarkable lunch at a beach taverna with nothing to prove.

What Santorini Food Costs

The spread on this island is wider than almost anywhere else in Greece, and it is driven almost entirely by the view.

Cheapest. A gyros or souvlaki in Fira, a bakery breakfast, or a village taverna lunch of two shared starters and a salad. This is genuinely good eating for very little.

Mid-range. An inland taverna dinner with a bottle of local wine. The best value-to-quality ratio in Santorini food and where we would send most visitors most nights.

Expensive. A caldera-rim dinner in Oia or Imerovigli, or fresh fish by weight anywhere. Both can be excellent and both carry a substantial premium.

Where the premium goes. On the rim you are paying for the terrace, the sunset and the fact that the building is on a cliff. That is a legitimate thing to buy once. It is a poor thing to buy every night.

The saving nobody takes. Buy wine at the estate rather than the restaurant. The mark-up on the same bottle between a winery and a caldera table is the single largest avoidable cost in Santorini food.

Eating Here With Dietary Requirements

Vegetarians eat extremely well. Most traditional Santorini food is vegetable-based because meat was expensive on a dry island, and a table of fava, tomatokeftedes, melitzanosalata, gemista, horiatiki and grilled vegetables is a complete meal that nobody thinks of as a compromise.

Vegans are better served here than in most of Europe, because Orthodox fasting periods require exactly that. Ask for nistisima dishes and any taverna will understand immediately. Fava, briam, dolmades made without cheese, gigantes beans and most vegetable dishes qualify.

Gluten-free is harder. Bread arrives automatically, most starters are fried in flour, and the fritters that define Santorini food are wheat-based. Grilled fish and meat, salads, fava and vegetable dishes are safe. Say so clearly rather than assuming.

Nut and sesame allergies need care with sweets and bread. Koulouri is covered in sesame; most desserts involve nuts.

Dairy is present in more dishes than menus suggest. Ask about the sauces.

Children. Grilled meat, chips, plain pasta and yoghurt are universally available, and Greek tavernas are relaxed about children in a way that suits families.

Santorini Food: Common Questions

What food is Santorini famous for?

Fava made from the island’s PDO split pea, tomatokeftedes made from its small intense tomato, white aubergine, chloro cheese, capers and caper leaves, and Assyrtiko and Vinsanto wine.

What should you eat in Santorini?

Start with fava and tomatokeftedes. Add chloro cheese if it is available, a horiatiki made with island tomatoes, and grilled fish at Ammoudi or Vlychada.

Why do Santorini tomatoes taste different?

The island has almost no rainfall and the plants live on night humidity held by volcanic ash. The fruit stays small and the flavour concentrates.

What is fava?

A yellow split pea purÃ©e made from Lathyrus clymenum, protected by PDO status, served warm with oil, onion, capers and lemon. It is nothing like broad-bean fava elsewhere.

Is Santorini food expensive?

The spread is enormous. Village tavernas are inexpensive; caldera-rim restaurants are among the priciest in Greece. Where you sit matters more than what you order.

Where is the best food in Santorini?

Inland, in Pyrgos and Megalochori, and at the fishing harbours of Ammoudi and Vlychada. The rim sells the view.

What wine goes with Santorini food?

Assyrtiko with almost everything savoury, Nykteri with heavier dishes, Vinsanto with dessert.

Do you need to book restaurants in Santorini?

Weeks ahead for any caldera-view table in season. Rarely for inland tavernas.

Is the tap water drinkable?

It is desalinated and generally not drunk. Bottled water is universal.

Can vegetarians eat well in Santorini?

Exceptionally. Most of the traditional cooking is vegetable-based, and Orthodox fasting means vegan requests are well understood.

Is a Santorini food tour worth it?

If it goes inland, includes producers and provides transport, yes. If it stays on the rim, it is a restaurant crawl with a view.

What should you bring home?

Wine bought at the estate, Vinsanto, dried fava, capers and tomato paste. Check your customs allowance first.

Santorini Food: Key Points

Santorini food is built on crops that survive with almost no water.
Fava is the single dish that defines Santorini food, and it is PDO protected.
Tomatokeftedes are the second pillar of Santorini food, made from the island tomato.
White aubergine and chloro cheese are the scarcest items in Santorini food.
Caper leaves as a salad green are a Santorini food habit, not a Greek one.
Assyrtiko was effectively made to drink with Santorini food.
Vinsanto is the oldest surviving product of the island’s wine trade.
The caldera rim sells the view; inland villages sell the best Santorini food.
Pyrgos and Megalochori are the two best villages for Santorini food.
Ammoudi and Vlychada are where the boats land and where the fish is best.
Lunch is the best-value window for Santorini food, not dinner.
Meze-style ordering is the right way to eat Santorini food for two.
Buying wine at the estate is the largest avoidable cost in Santorini food.
Autumn is the best season overall for Santorini food.
Vegetarians and vegans are unusually well served by traditional Santorini food.
A Santorini food tour must go inland and include producers to be worth booking.

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Knowing What Kind of Place You Are Walking Into

Greek eating places are not interchangeable, and reading the sign correctly tells you what the kitchen does before you sit down. This matters more than it sounds when you are hunting good Santorini food.

Taverna. The default. Family-run, printed or handwritten menu, meze to share, grilled meat and fish, house wine by the carafe. The backbone of Santorini food and where most of the good eating happens.

Estiatorio. A step up in formality, often with cooked dishes of the day sitting in trays — moussaka, gemista, briam. Lunch-oriented, excellent value.

Psarotaverna. A fish taverna. Ammoudi and Vlychada are lined with them. Fish is sold by weight from the ice.

Psistaria. A grill house. Meat, skewers, chops, and very little else.

Mezedopolio or ouzeri. Small plates designed around drinking ouzo or tsipouro. Order five or six things and stay for hours.

Kafeneio. The traditional village coffee house, usually full of older men, serving coffee, spirits and a small plate. Not a restaurant, and entirely welcoming.

Souvlatzidiko. Gyros and souvlaki counters. The cheapest good food on Santorini by a distance.

Zacharoplasteio. A patisserie, for baklava, galaktoboureko and the rest.

Fourno. A bakery, and the correct answer to breakfast in any village.

How Greeks Actually Eat

Getting the customs right makes ordering Santorini food easier and the evening considerably more pleasant.

Everything is shared. Dishes arrive when they are ready and go into the middle of the table. Ordering one main each is a tourist habit and produces a worse meal.

Starters are the point. A table of five or six meze plus one grilled thing is the standard, and it is how you cover the most interesting Santorini food in a single sitting.

Nothing is rushed. A taverna dinner runs two to three hours. The bill will not arrive until you ask, and asking early is not rude but does end the evening.

Bread and cover. A small per-head charge appears on almost every bill. It is standard practice, not a scam.

Water. Bottled, ordered by the litre, cheap.

House wine. Ordered by the carafe in half and full litres. On Santorini the house white is frequently local and frequently good.

The end of the meal. A small dessert and a shot of raki or tsipouro usually arrive free. Refusing is fine but accepting is better.

Paying. Cards are accepted almost everywhere, though small village tavernas may prefer cash.

Children are welcome everywhere, at any hour.

Cooking Classes and Producer Visits

Several operations on the island run cooking classes, usually built around the local ingredients: fava, tomatokeftedes, dolmades, tzatziki and a dessert. They typically last three to four hours and finish with eating what you made.

The better ones include a market or garden visit first, because the point of Santorini food is the produce rather than the technique. If a class does not show you the ingredients growing or being sold, it is a cookery demonstration rather than an education.

Producer visits are the other option and in our view the more interesting one. The wineries all receive visitors; a handful of farms and a cheese producer will as well, by arrangement. Seeing a kouloura vine up close — a coiled basket lying on volcanic gravel, ungrafted, over a hundred years old, growing fruit with no irrigation — explains more about Santorini food in five minutes than any menu can.

Our food experience is built around exactly this: villages, producers and the island’s own ingredients, with a driver so the wine is not a problem.

Where to Buy Ingredients

Village grocers in Pyrgos, Megalochori, Emporio and Mesaria stock local fava, capers, tomato paste and honey at ordinary prices rather than souvenir prices.

Bakeries for koulouri, bougatsa and village bread.

Wineries for wine, obviously, and several also sell fava, capers and preserves from the estate.

Supermarkets in Fira and Kamari for everything else, and considerably cheaper than the tourist shops on the rim.

What to avoid. The souvenir food shops on the main lanes of Oia and Fira sell a great deal of imported product in Santorini packaging at several times the price. If it is not from an estate or a village shop, check the label.

Practical Notes on Eating Here

Reservations. Caldera-view tables in season need weeks. Everything else needs a day at most.

Sunset dinners. Restaurants with a west view book out entirely for the sunset slot, and many run two sittings. If you want the light, take the early one.

Getting there. Parking in Oia and Fira is the practical barrier to inland dining rather than distance. A driver removes it, and it is the main reason our guests end up eating in villages they would otherwise never reach.

Getting back. Taxis do not appear on demand and there is no ride-hailing on Santorini. If you are eating away from your hotel, arrange the return before you sit down.

Dress. Informal everywhere. Even the expensive caldera restaurants are relaxed.

Season. Many inland tavernas close entirely from November to March, and the ones that stay open serve the best Santorini food of the year to almost nobody.

Hygiene. Standards are high and stomach trouble here is far more often heat and dehydration than food.

The Short Version

Order fava and tomatokeftedes on the first night. Drink Assyrtiko with them. Eat inland at least twice, at Pyrgos or Megalochori, and eat fish once at Ammoudi or Vlychada with your feet almost in the water. Buy one caldera-view dinner as an occasion rather than a habit. Visit a winery and buy the wine there rather than in a shop.

That is the whole of Santorini food in six decisions, and following them will produce a better week of eating than any restaurant list, because the island’s cooking is not about finding the famous places. It is about eating the things that only grow here, in the villages where they are still cooked properly.

Tell us what you want to eat and which days you are here, and we will build the route around the table rather than the sights.

What to Order on Each Night of a Week

A practical way to eat through the island’s produce without repeating yourself, and a fair test of how much variety Santorini food actually holds.

Night one: the essentials

Fava, tomatokeftedes, horiatiki made with island tomatoes, and grilled octopus, with a carafe of house white. This is the introduction to Santorini food and it should be eaten inland rather than on the rim.

Night two: the sea

Ammoudi or Vlychada. Marinated anchovies, fried kalamari, and one whole fish by weight for the table. Assyrtiko rather than house wine.

Night three: the oven

An estiatorio with trays: gemista, briam, moussaka, and whatever the day’s cooked dish is. The least photographed and most comforting corner of Santorini food.

Night four: the occasion

The caldera-view dinner, booked weeks earlier. Order whatever the kitchen is proud of and accept that you are paying for the terrace.

Night five: meze and ouzo

A mezedopolio, six small plates, and no main course at all. Tirokafteri, dolmades, saganaki, caper leaves, chloro if it is available and grilled sardines.

Night six: the grill

A psistaria for lamb chops, souvlaki and chips, which is what Greeks eat when they are not performing Greek food for anyone.

Night seven: back to the village

Return to whichever inland taverna you liked most and order the same thing again. Every guest we have ever asked has said this was the best meal of the week.

Five Things People Get Wrong About Santorini Food

“It is all overpriced.” The caldera rim is expensive. Two hundred metres inland the same dishes cost a third as much, and the entire interior of the island is inexpensive.

“Greek food is just moussaka and gyros.” Neither is a Santorini speciality. The island’s own cooking is fava, tomato fritters, white aubergine, capers and fish.

“The Greek salad has lettuce.” It does not. Horiatiki is tomato, cucumber, onion, pepper, olives and feta.

“You need reservations everywhere.” Only for the caldera-view tables. Inland you can walk in almost any night.

“The best restaurants have the best views.” On this island they are close to mutually exclusive, and that single fact explains most of what disappoints visitors about Santorini food.

Santorini Food, Honestly

This is a dry volcanic rock with no fresh water, and its kitchen was built out of that scarcity. Everything good about Santorini food follows from it: fruit too small and too concentrated, pulses that survive drought, capers that grow out of stone, cheese made in tiny quantity, and a white wine with the acidity of a much colder place.

What that produces is not a large cuisine. It is perhaps a dozen dishes, cooked well, from things that grow within a few kilometres. Eaten in a village taverna at an inland table for a fraction of the caldera price, it is one of the most distinctive local food cultures in the Mediterranean.

Eaten only on the rim, from a menu written for people who will be here for two nights, it is expensive and unremarkable. The whole difference between those two experiences of Santorini food is a twenty-minute drive.

A Menu Glossary for Santorini Food

What you will see written on a taverna board, in the order it tends to appear.

Words that describe the cooking

Sto fourno — baked. Tis oras — grilled to order. Tiganito — fried. Sxaras — from the grill. Lemonato — cooked with lemon. Ladera — vegetables cooked in olive oil, served warm or at room temperature, and a whole category of Greek and Santorini food that visitors routinely skip.

Words that describe the plate

Mezedes — small shared plates. Orektika — starters. Kiria piata — main courses. Salates — salads. Psaria — fish. Thalassina — seafood. Glyka — sweets.

Words worth recognising on Santorini specifically

Fava Santorinis — the PDO split pea, and the thing to order first. Tomatokeftedes — tomato fritters. Chloro Santorinis — the local fresh goat’s cheese. Kapari and kaparofilla — capers and caper leaves. Aspri melitzana — white aubergine. Brandada — salt cod. Sfougato — the courgette bake. Koufeto — marrow in honey. Melitini — Easter cheese pastries.

Wine words

Assyrtiko, Nykteri, Vinsanto, Mavrotragano, Mandilaria, and kouloura for the basket-trained vine. Chyma means house wine, sold by the carafe.

Useful phrases

Ton logariasmo parakalo — the bill please. Ti proteinete? — what do you recommend? Einai nistisimo? — is it vegan? Choris gluteni — without gluten. Stin ygeia mas — to our health.

One Last Thing About Santorini Food

The best meals we hear about from guests are almost never at the restaurants that appear on lists. They are a long lunch in a village square where nobody spoke much English, a plate of fish at a marina with the boats twenty metres away, or a winery terrace in the last hour of light with a bottle bought at the counter.

None of those require research. They require getting away from the rim, eating at the hours Greeks eat, and ordering the four or five things that only grow on this particular island. Do that and Santorini food will be one of the things you remember about the trip rather than one of the things you spent too much on.

Pairing the Wine With the Plate

Assyrtiko and Santorini food grew up on the same waterless ground, which is why the pairings are unusually straightforward.

Fava with young Assyrtiko. The wine’s acidity cuts the purÃ©e’s density and the salinity picks up the capers. This is the pairing the island was built on.

Tomatokeftedes with young Assyrtiko too. Fried, sweet and herbaceous against something bone dry and mineral.

Grilled fish with Nykteri. The fuller, barrel-aged style has enough weight for a whole fish off the grill without overwhelming it.

Octopus with Mavrotragano. One of the few red pairings that genuinely works with seafood, because the grape is savoury rather than fruity.

Chloro cheese with anything cold and dry. The cheese is delicate and a heavy wine erases it.

Lamb and slow-cooked meat with Mandilaria. Tannic, rustic, and exactly what the dish wants.

Vinsanto with walnut cake, baklava or on its own. It is sweet enough to stand alone and complex enough to be worth doing so.

The rule if you forget all of it: order the local white with everything savoury and the local sweet wine afterwards. On this island that will be right nine times out of ten, which is not something you can say about the food and wine of many places.

What to Remember

Santorini food is small, specific and shaped entirely by drought. Four or five ingredients define it, two wines carry it, and the good version of it happens in villages rather than on cliffs. Order fava first, drink Assyrtiko with it, and go inland at least twice.

Everything else — the restaurant lists, the view tables, the tasting menus — is optional. Those six words are not.

Eating Well on Santorini Without Spending a Fortune

The reputation for expense is earned only on the caldera rim, and a visitor who never eats there can have a week of excellent Santorini food for very little.

Eat your main meal at lunch. Tavernas run the same kitchen at lower prices, and the cooked dishes of the day are at their best.

Order meze rather than mains. Four shared starters and a salad feeds two people properly and costs less than two main courses. It is also the better way to eat Santorini food, because it covers more of the island’s specialities in one sitting.

Drink the house wine. Ordered by the carafe, frequently local, and a fraction of bottle prices.

Use the bakeries. Breakfast from a fourno costs a euro or two and is better than most hotel buffets.

Use the souvlaki counters. The cheapest good food on the island by a wide margin, and genuinely good.

Shop in the village grocers. Fava, capers, tomato paste and honey at ordinary prices rather than souvenir prices.

Buy wine at the estate and drink it on your own terrace instead of paying restaurant mark-up on the same bottle.

Stay off the rim for dinner six nights out of seven. This single habit is worth more than every other saving on this list combined, and the food is better.

Why We Care What You Eat

We run tours rather than restaurants, so we have no commercial interest in which taverna you choose. What we do have is several hundred conversations a season with guests about where they ate, and the pattern in those conversations is consistent enough to be worth stating.

People who ate exclusively on the caldera rim describe Santorini food as beautiful, expensive and slightly disappointing. People who ate inland at least twice describe it as one of the best things about the trip. That is the whole finding, and it has held for years.

The ingredients behind it — the PDO fava, the small tomato, the white aubergine, the chloro cheese, the ungrafted vines — are grown in shrinking quantities on land that is worth more with buildings on it. Eating them where they are cooked properly, and buying them where they are made, is the only vote a visitor gets on whether they continue to exist.

Start Here

If you read none of the above, three sentences will still get you most of the way. Order fava and tomatokeftedes on your first night, with a carafe of Assyrtiko, at a taverna that is not on the caldera rim. Eat fish once at Ammoudi or Vlychada, with the boats in front of you and the price agreed before it is cooked. Visit one winery, taste the Vinsanto, and buy the wine there rather than in a shop.

Those three decisions cover the island’s PDO split pea, its volcanic tomato, its fresh goat’s cheese, its capers, its fish and both of its wines, which is essentially the whole of Santorini food. Everything after that is refinement, and refinement is what the rest of this page is for.

Tell us which days you are here and what you want to eat, and we will build the route around the table rather than the sights.

A Note on Seasonality

One last practical point. Several of the things described on this page — chloro cheese, white aubergine, melitini, wild greens, the first tomatoes — are genuinely seasonal and produced in small quantity. If a taverna does not have them, that is usually honesty rather than a failing. Ask what is good today and order that instead; it is how Santorini food has always worked.

One More Thing

If a taverna owner tells you the fava is theirs, grown on their own plot, ask about it. On this island that conversation is frequently the best part of the meal, and it is the shortest route into what Santorini food actually is.