The Old Mill is the gourmet room at Elounda Mare, Elounda, Crete, and it takes its name from an object in the garden. An old millstone stands there by the water, with the tables laid in a ring around it under the trees and the sea in view. The house says its regulars have been coming back for 30 years, for the menu and for the wine.
The kitchen’s own term for what it cooks is Cretan fusion: the unadorned cooking of the island set beside the imagination of the team that runs the room. Dinner is served on selected evenings given over to gourmet food.
The hands behind it
Stavros Kokkinakis is the chef, and he has built the carte on the fresh ingredients of Crete. What he cooks is his own reading of modern Cretan food, drawn from traditional local recipes and from local raw material, so a dish usually starts with something grown or fished on the island and then takes a technique to it. Babis Papadatos is the sommelier, and the cellar is his.
What the carte names
The menu says where things come from. A Cretan fish salad is built on grouper, with tarama, ponzu and pickled Knossos cucumber. A vegetable sofegada comes with xygalo cream cheese from Sitia, a carob fritter and beetroot gel. Grilled octopus arrives with potato espuma and a vinegared Cretan sausage. Scallops come with grape molasses, a courgette fritter and confit cherry tomatoes, and a green salad is dressed with a raki and honey vinaigrette. Staka, the Cretan butter cream, is served with a poached egg, thyme mushrooms and a crisp potato fritter. Seafood is wrapped in vine leaves with a fava foam and pickled caper leaves, and a chicken tagliata comes crusted in aged Cretan mizithra. Smoked apaki, the island’s cured pork, is plated with xinohondros, the local groats, under a foam of xynomyzithra cheese.
Among the main dishes, the local pasta skioufichta is listed by its village, Kroustas, and served with smoked pork and Amfilochia pecorino with black truffle. Ravioli is filled with Cretan anthotyro and spinach, then sauced with lobster and sautéed crayfish. Grilled red mullet comes with cauliflower purée, sautéed sea bass with grilled prawns and tarama pearls, a leg of lamb Cretan yahni style with a lemon verbena gremolata, and rabbit braised with lemon, green olives and crisp potatoes. A Black Angus fillet is flambéed with Metaxa. Alongside all of it the carte carries Ossetra caviar, charged by the 28-gram portion.
The desserts stay on the island: the chef’s own orangeopita with carob praline and candied orange, an anthotyro cheesecake under salted honey, a plate of Cretan cheeses, and crêpes Suzette for two.
Planning a table
The pattern is dinner only, four nights a week, 7pm to 10pm, so a table here is booked into one of the evenings set aside for it. Dinner is 100 to 140 euros a head, and prices on the 2026 carte are in euros with municipal tax and VAT included. The caviar and the two Black Angus dishes are marked payable by guests whichever dining option they are on. The room will close for the winter on 27 October 2026 and reopen on 5 May 2027, which puts the serving season between early May and late October.
Who is this for
Anyone who wants dinner outdoors and unhurried, in a hotel garden on the edge of the water at Elounda. A piano plays live through service, and the view carries over the waters of Mirabello bay. It suits two or four people with the whole night free, and it rewards a slow read of a long carte and an appetite for the island’s own produce. The garden setting makes the weather part of the evening, so a warm, still night is the one to pick.
