Crete, part II – The Restaurants

Better late than never. Part one can be found here.

So, obviously, sleeping and eating at a place that’s pretty much vegan rocks. But that definitely wasn’t the only wonderful part of the holiday. Though it wasn’t as imaginative as in the B&B, it was quite easy to find vegan food everywhere we went. There were usually things on the menu that were vegan or at least vegetarian, and they were always willing to leave the cheese or cream off and make me just the vegetables.

We had lunch in taverns, where the easiest option was to take a Greek salad without the feta cheese. It’s so fresh and delicious, especially with extra olives, because I love those. I’m not going to post pictures of every salad that I had – though I did take them – but I did choose this dish a lot. Just look at these:

Perfect for the warm weather. But there were other things I had for lunch too:

Roasted vegetables! Courgette, aubergine, potato, tomato in olive oil. Quite yummy. And more veggies:

These don’t look that special, as they’re just french fries, really.

Then there are a couple of restaurants that I’d like to talk about a bit more specifically. The first one is a vegetarian restaurant called The Third Eye. Now the restaurant isn’t completely vegetarian, but apart from that, it’s a nice place. It’s in Palaiochora, near the beach, and I liked the decorations. Here’s some pictures of the place:

It looks very cheerful, I think. I read there’s live music there regularly and it’s very busy in the evenings, but when we went there for lunch it was quiet and there weren’t many people at all. This was the menu that day:

It wasn’t expensive at all and I really enjoyed eating at this place. I tried half portions of the following:

Thai curry of the day.

Artichoke, potato and carrot. All in all, I had a lovely lunch. But I ate at some other, non-vegetarian places too and had great meals there.

One of them was Tamam, in Chania, a tavern in a beautiful old building. I loved the atmosphere there. I didn’t take any pictures for some reason, but if you want you can learn a bit more about the restaurant here. The meal I had here was simple, but quite delicious.

Different kinds of olives as a starter.

Stuffed vegetables (a tomato and a bell pepper, and that’s a potato on the side).

Then there’s Avli restaurant in Rethymno. The place is huge and I only saw a small part of it, but that was enough to convince me of how beautiful it was. Again, have a look at other people’s pictures: here and here (bottom of the page). There was at least one dish on the menu that was completely vegan, so I chose that. It was courgette and aubergine in a tomato sauce with soured wheat. Simple, but surprisingly delicious again.

My mother had the same and loved it as well. As a starter they served us a big plate full of all kinds of appetizers, which also contained stuffed vine leaves and some roasted vegetables that were vegan.

The last restaurant we visited was in Chania again and I just discovered they have their own website, so if you want you can read more about them there.

It really is a lovely place, I think you can already tell from the picture :). I could find nothing vegan on the menu right away, but it was no problem at all for them to make this lovely dish without cheese for me:

It’s bread filled with spinach, walnuts and raisins. The food here was different from the more typically Greek things we found in other restaurants, you could definitely see the Middle-Eastern influences. A great place, where I would love to go again. And that goes for every restaurant in this post…

If you’re eating out in Crete, you’ll quickly notice that you’re never alone at your table. There are usually a couple of (stray) cats walking around the terrace and sometimes in the restaurant, looking out for the people who are willing to give them a bit of their food. It’s very endearing and worrying at the same time, but luckily most of the cats I saw there didn’t look underfed. From what I understand, there are some people who feed them during winter and I read about an organisation there that takes care of the stray cats. In any case, walking around the city, there were cats everywhere you looked and I loved taking as many pictures of them as I could. I’ll end this post with the ones I found most adorable, found fast-asleep in a planter in the middle of a city: