Where to eat in Paros

Paros eats in its harbours. The island’s three eating towns are all built around water - Naoussa’s fishing port, Parikia’s long front, Piso Livadi’s small east-coast quay - and dinner here usually means a table with boats in view. Which harbour you eat in is mostly decided by where you sleep, and the where-to-stay guide frames that choice.

Naoussa is the island’s dinner table. The fishing harbour with the half-sunken fort has become one of the best-known dining settings in the Cyclades, and it behaves accordingly: the portside tables book out in season, the lanes behind hold the overflow, and the shore north-east of town has a run of destination seafood houses people drive to. It is the right place for the one big dinner of the trip.

Parikia eats later and looser. The port capital’s tables run along the front and through the old town lanes - less staged than Naoussa, easier to walk into, and where several of the island’s most consistently rated kitchens sit. A number of them are evening-only.

The east coast is the quiet option. Piso Livadi and the harbours near Golden Beach keep family tavernas by the water that fill with people staying on that side. Nothing about them is a secret; they are simply where the east of the island has dinner.

How the places below were chosen. Each card names a real, currently trading place selected by the island’s visitors, not by us: it clears a review-count floor and a rating floor on TripAdvisor or Google, with no contradiction on the other platform, and it carries the date we last checked it. We have not eaten our way around Paros, so no card describes a dish - it says what kind of place it is, where it is, and that the people who ate there rate it consistently high.

What this page will not do. No prices, which move within a season. And no certainty about winter: many Paros kitchens close out of season, so check the place directly before travelling for it.

Start at Paros for the island, and Greek food and drink for how the menus work.