With a bit more effort…
Araouzos Taverna
It’s been 12 years since I last set foot in this taverna, never was there the pressing need to return, due in the main to the then overly dark and dismal dining conditions. Thankfully, new owners Yiannis and Andreas have revamped and decent lighting has been installed so you can actually see what you are eating; the whole place now resonates as a typical, very comfortable, attractively decorated Cypriot Taverna, a place the tourists will love, where locals will happily bring house guests to dine.
As this is a strictly Cypriot establishment with only Cypriot food and wines on offer I had a little bit of a problem. Not, I hasten to add with the exclusion of foreign wines, it’s with the strictly ‘Cypriot’ cuisine I have trouble. This is because Cyprus doesn’t really have a true ‘own brand’ cuisine, with almost every traditional recipe having at one time been influenced either by Greek, Arab or Turkish cuisine, and it’s through these culinary cultures one can then legitimately serve up an amalgamation of diverse tastes and textures, and still lay claim to them being Cypriot.
But this didn’t actually happen for us the night we sat down to dine on their 20-dish mezze. The meal, although perfectly acceptable, was somewhat boring, with no great mix of flavours.
The homemade lentil soup was excellent as a starter and gave us high expectations for the rest of the meal, but the array of dips consisted of the usual suspects and although they were okay, most were bulk buy supermarket offerings. My Cypriot friend gave the homemade loukanika top marks for flavour, the village halloumi also scored high points as did the chicken livers. The potatoes however failed miserably which indicates the cook doesn’t respect even basic Cypriot cooking.
You may well now wonder why I am being so picky about Araouzos. Over the past 15 years I must have ploughed my way through 15,000 mezze dishes, ranging from Saginaki and braised squid to a set of tasty grilled sheep’s testicles. From this myriad of mezzes, I now return regularly to only three out of the dozens of tavernas I’ve tried. That’s because they offer a good standard of culinary consistency, have cooks who take great pride in trying out new and seasonal dishes, where you happily pay the bill and at the same time wonder how they do all that for the price, where decent wine is on offer and you can always return home with a bag of leftovers for the dog.
To make Araouzos one of those perfect tavernas, they need to inject some culinary passion into their food, so their mezze can be transformed into a lip smacking, value for money delight, one that will encourage folk to get in their car and regularly make the drive to Kathikas to savour the smell of charcoal smoke, seared meat and dried herbs.
Yiannis and Andreas have put in an immense amount of work trying to clean up and decorate this lovely old stone building. Now they have to resolve to put the same energy into creating their very own kitchen culture, one that will gain a reputation for producing food that has been cooked with care, that’s tasty, original and different to the usual run-of-the-mill mezzes currently offered by most of their competitors. If they succeed in doing this, they will have every Brit from Kouklia, Konia and Peyia knocking on their door asking for more.
VITAL STATISTICS
SPECIALTY Cypriot food
WHERE Main Street, Kathikas, Paphos
CONTACT 26 632076, 99 186496 or 99 471540
PRICE €17 for mezze
