Dining in Larnaca, Cyprus

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Food is basic, mostly meat, and mostly grilled, the portions are huge, and while the service can be a little too rapid at times (you can still be working your way through the salads when the next course arrives), the buzzy ambiance, and the price, more than make up for this. Vegetarians are very poorly served here though, and you’d be advised, too, to steer clear of the fish, which is imported and frozen.

Salad is accompanied by the usual pitta and olives, but you get beetroot and pilaf as standard with it too, and they offer a good range of other cold appetisers, most of which are home-made, and all very reasonable. There are some nice hot appetisers too, the mushrooms with eggs being particularly delicious. Standard mains such as moussaka, souvlaki and souvla all come with huge portions of excellent chips, and the Vlachos mixed grill has a bit of absolutely everything, including the local village sausages, and haloumi cheese! Tavas (beef stew) and kleftiko (lamb slow cooked in the oven) have to be ordered a day in advance, and there are sometimes seasonal specialities available that aren’t on the menu such as snails. It’s always possible, too, to ask to try something that you see another table eating, so don’t be shy.

But if you’re up for it, do try the meze. It’s just £7.50 per person, and while some of it is not for the squeamish, there is so much choice that you will find plenty to try even if you leave a quarter of it. The meze doesn’t vary much from week to week, although some things, such as snails, are seasonal. You get all the usual appetisers such as salad and olives, pilaf, beetroot and tzatziki, but usually also a selection of seasonal greens – such as pickled caperberry leaves, complete with thorns! There’s mushrooms and onions scrambled in egg with a dash of sherry, snails – sometimes large, sometimes small - and grilled haloumi with bacon. There’s blood sausages, chicken livers simmered until tender in red wine vinegar, grilled beef liver, lamb brain cooked in tomato sauce, and "sweets" – kebabs made of choice cuts of heart, lung and intestine – at Vlachos they make use of everything! And for the more traditional taste there’s pork fillet, kebab, sheftalia and lamb chops. Oh yes, of course there’s chips too, and fruit to finish. Vlachos has a very reasonable range of wine and drinks, and is open for dinner seven days. A meal for two will rarely set you back above £20, so it’s well worth the trip out of town.

Just under a kilometre from the centre of town, away from the tourist restaurants and their picture menus, there are a clutch of tavernas on the main road. Slightly cheaper than the main drag, the food is definitely not of the "calamari and chips" variety, and there are no waiters hovering outside waiting to hustle you in. The Pytharka is decorated in traditional style, with big windows that open up onto the terrace (unfortunately facing directly onto the main road) in the summer. Open seven days, on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sunday nights there is live traditional music. The taverna is family run, with Chara in charge of the kitchen, and Andy in front of house (and occasionally singing with the band). Most of Chara’s recipes were passed down from her grandmother, and it is the simplicity of the cooking that is its strength.

What’s available depends very much upon what’s in season at the market, but some classic bean dishes such as louvi me lahana (black-eyed beans with chard), and fasoulaki (French beans cooked in red wine, with or without lamb) are standards. We popped in for lunch one day, and the simple but very fresh food, and Chara’s enthusiasm for her traditional cooking, tempted us back for the "traditional" meze a few nights later. A litre of house red (£7) was accompanied by traditional "nibbles" of cheese, smoked ham and smoked lamb. You can get a grill meze at the Pytharka featuring all the usual suspects, and you can also opt out of the meze and have the usual selection of meats from the grill, as well as some of the vegetarian dishes I had tried for lunch. But we went for the "traditional" version of the meze at £8.50.

A meze for two can be overwhelming, but at the Pytharka, the portions were just right. Along with the home-made bread and the usual selection of appetisers, we had a potato salad dressed with lemon and herbs, another mashed potato dish with garlic, hot grilled black olives, carrot salad and a kohlrabi salad. And then came spare ribs, village sausage and sheftalia. And then there were dolmades and keftedes, kolokassi in tomato sauce, two or three aubergine dishes, Lefkara lamb, another baked lamb dish, village macaroni, spinach with cheese, snails, roast potatoes (a welcome change from chips) – and a lot more. The variety of tastes and flavourings, the combination of baked and grilled food, and the concentration of vegetable dishes, made the meal delicious rather than the epic of endurance that a grill meze often is. We even managed the fruit accompanied by small pastry parcels stuffed with apple and cinnamon that made up dessert. Everything was home made, and the dishes came at a leisurely pace, and service was attentive without being intrusive. The Pytharka is that unusual thing in the centre of Larnaka, a real traditional taverna serving authentic local food.