Meltemi Restaurant at Aigio

The Meltemi Restaurant at Diyeliotika - Aigio's pretty seaside suburb - is a place that's hard to attach a label to. Being on the water, it has attractive umbrellas and beach beds with service, yet if you enter from the long, lovely garden with its shady mulberry trees and its wrought-iron armchairs, it looks like a bar / cafe, while to the rear, there's a beautifully laid out dining area arranged on a wooden deck. But I decided to call it a restaurant when I walked into the kitchen and saw the kitchen 'brigade' and how well organized they were, and most of all when I tasted some of their dishes, which fall somewhere between local and Mediterranean cuisine but not only.

So, the Meltemi is a hybrid, which has just about everything and in 2018 its founders, Efi and Dimitris Apostolopoulos, will celebrate its 20th anniversary.

We watched Kyria Efi prepare the local bourget (fish stew), sardines stuffed with garlic and parsley, stuffed anchovies and tagliatelle with shrimp.

A look at the menu revealed an extraordinary gamut of dishes - the house philosophy is that here you will find everything you could possibly wish for. There were a dozen appetisers, a dozen seafood dishes, a dozen salads, 16 special dishes, and a dozen grilled meats and fresh fish to choose from.

Apart from the foods we watched being prepared, we tried the cheese pies with homemade phyllo, calamari with multicolored peppers, seafood tart, aubergine souffle, and veal fillet with a white sauce of mushrooms and brandy.

Among the salad, what won our hearts were the Meltemi salad with raisins, orange, apple and a honey dressing and a salad with lettuce, pomegranate seeds, pine kernels and pistachios.

The Meltemi restaurant is a beautiful spot where you can come for breakfast and spend the whole day, taking advantage of all the options and enjoying wonderful food and excellent service.