(UPDATED: September 9, 2018. Reposted images.)
Last weekend, we celebrated our anniversary in Cyprus. Prof read a review in one of the guidebooks that Zanettos offered some good meze cuisine. So we ventured to try meze again. (Meze can’t mean everything is salty right?)
This was our second time to go out in the evening past 8 pm. It was almost a world record for us, since we don’t leave the house as a couple without our kids. Prof had a general idea of the restaurant’s location. So when he took a turn down a narrow dark alley, I thought we would get mugged when we stepped out of the car. But Zanettos was nice and quaint. The lamppost lit the alleyway with the smell of light rain. No signs of a potential mugging took place.
We walked right to our seats at 7:45 pm. Only one other couple was already seated for dinner, and then there was us. We had what felt like a 20-30 course meal. They don’t kid around when they do mezze.
The first round consisted of tahini, pita bread, salad (strong tasting arugula), beets, Greek yogurt made from sheep’s milk, and mashed garlic potatoes.
The second round would be more of the foods we ate at the other restaurant in Limmasol: haloumi (traditional cooked cheese which becomes more salty the longer you cook), liver, fried mushrooms, fried zucchini, and saif tahlia, which is another staple in mezze cuisine. One of our favorite mezze dishes was the spinach rice, which was buttery and smooth with a hint of garlic. The third round was the heavy hitter: snails, chicken and pork kebabs, and a bunch of pasta like dishes.
By the time dessert rolled around (say 9:30 pm), the back half of the place was packed with people. You could hear the hustle and bustle of the crowd, laughing, and sharing good conversation over their meal. We even got to take a picture with the head chef. While we would like to think that two nights in a row of meze is enough for us, it probably won’t be our last.
