Eating in Cyprus

Mezze is the whole meal, not the beginning of one

When you order mezze at a taverna you are not ordering a course. You are handing the kitchen the entire meal and agreeing to eat whatever it decides to send, in whatever order it decides to send it, until it stops. A full one runs to twenty or thirty separate dishes and takes two to three hours. It is ordered for the table rather than per person, and there is usually one price for the whole performance regardless of how much arrives.

The mistake almost every first-timer makes is treating the opening dishes as the meal. Mezze starts light and cheap to produce — dips, bread, olives, salads, pickles, a little cheese — and a hungry table will demolish all of it. Then the halloumi arrives, and the sausage, and the vine leaves, and then, forty minutes in, the actual meat starts: lamb, pork, chicken, one after another. People who ate their fill of hummus are defeated by a dish they would have loved.

Eat a little of everything and leave something on each plate. Pace it, expect the good things late, and do not order anything else alongside it. If you want a smaller version, ask for a mezze for fewer people than you have, which is normal and understood — tavernas would rather scale it than watch food go back.

Halloumi, and why it behaves like that

The cheese is the island's most exported idea and it is genuinely unusual. It squeaks against the teeth, and it grills or fries without collapsing into a puddle — most cheeses melt, and this one holds its shape and browns instead. That comes from how it is made: the curd is heated before it is shaped, which sets the protein structure so it will not flow again with heat. Traditionally it was sheep's and goat's milk, often mixed; a great deal of what is made now includes cow's milk, and the sheep-and-goat versions taste markedly stronger and saltier.

It appears constantly — grilled in mezze, fried for breakfast, raw with watermelon in summer, folded into bread with dried mint, which is its classic partner. Eat it hot if you have the choice. Cold, straight from the fridge, it is rubbery and oversalted and gives a poor impression of a very good cheese.

It carries a different name on either side of the island: on menus in the south it is halloumi, in the north hellim. It is the same cheese. Several other things work this way here, so if a word on a menu looks unfamiliar it is often something you have already eaten under another name.

The dishes worth knowing by name

Kleftiko is the one to order if you order one thing: lamb cooked for many hours in a sealed clay oven until it gives way completely. Sealing is the point — nothing escapes, so it steams in its own fat and comes out falling off the bone rather than roasted. Afelia is pork simmered in red wine with crushed coriander seed, which is the flavour combination that most marks this island's cooking out from Greek or Turkish food. Sheftalia are small grilled rissoles of minced meat wrapped in caul fat, which bastes them as it renders and then disappears.

Around those: koupepia, vine leaves stuffed with rice and mince; louvi, black-eyed beans dressed with lemon and oil and eaten warm or cold; stifado, a beef and onion stew heavy with vinegar and cinnamon; and tavas, a slow oven dish of meat with cumin. Village bread is worth eating on its own. At Easter the bakeries fill with flaounes, a savoury cheese pastry that appears for that season and then vanishes.

Commandaria, zivania and what else is in the glass

Commandaria is the island's famous wine — sweet, dark and concentrated, made from grapes left to dry in the sun before pressing, in a handful of villages on the southern slopes of the mountains. Its claim to fame is continuity: it is generally described as the oldest named wine still in production, and it has been made in the same area under the same name for a very long time. It is a dessert wine and it is strong. A small glass after a mezze is the correct quantity.

Zivania is the other local bottle, a clear grape spirit distilled from what is left after pressing, and it is much stronger than it looks. It is offered as a gesture at the end of a meal and refusing is fine, but drinking it like wine is not. Beyond those, the island's dry wine has improved enormously in recent decades and the indigenous grape varieties are worth asking for by name rather than defaulting to something international.

Coffee is the small, strong, unfiltered cup served with grounds in the bottom and a glass of water. Order it sweet, medium or plain, and let it settle before drinking. Like the cheese, it goes by different names depending which part of the island you are in, and it is the same drink.

Where to eat, and when

The gap between a village taverna and a resort-strip restaurant is wider here than in most places, and it is the single biggest determinant of whether you eat well. The resort strips serve an international holiday menu competently and cheaply to people who want it. The mountain and inland villages serve the food described above to people who live there. Twenty minutes inland from almost any coastal base is a different meal.

Eat late. Lunch runs long and dinner starts later than northern European habits expect, and a taverna that looks empty at seven will be full at nine. Book for a full mezze rather than arriving and asking, because the kitchen needs to know. And if a place has no printed menu and simply tells you what there is, that is a good sign rather than a bad one.