The Yacht Club is the Greek restaurant at Elounda Mare, Elounda, Crete. The room is a terrace on the cliff, looking down on the hotel’s private cove and the quiet beach in it. The kitchen is Greek contemporary, built on local seafood, and it cooks the traditional dishes of the island alongside the catch.
Two cartes run in the same room. Midday is the lighter of the two, close to what a Greek table looks like on a hot afternoon. The evening list is the more ambitious, and it reaches for lobster, langoustines and Black Angus.
What lunch brings
Lunch starts with a plate of Greek spreads, tzatziki, aubergine dip and taramasalata, or fried courgette with sheep’s yoghurt and mint, or fresh fried potatoes under Cretan graviera and garden oregano. Mussels are steamed with ouzo, thyme and parsley. Octopus comes grilled over fava purée with caramelised onion and balsamic pearls, and the day’s fish is served raw as well, as a crudo with avocado cream, citrus and potato straw.
The Cretan salad is built on fresh and sun-dried tomato, caper leaves, purslane, samphire, pickled onion and seared anthotyro. Among the main dishes are grilled sardines with briam vegetables and baked feta, lamb chops with a stamnagathi salad and fresh oregano, pork gyros in a house pita, traditional moussaka, and a beef burger with cheddar and bacon. Dessert can be a yoghurt panna cotta with Cretan thyme honey.
What dinner adds
Dinner keeps the Greek frame and raises the material. Grouper opens as a tartare, with a soup of Argitikos melon, orange zest and lime pearls. Langoustines are sautéed with potato espuma, peas and grilled artichokes. Calamari is stuffed with mussels, shrimp and fennel.
The Cretan ingredients are named by their place. A wild greens pie comes with feta and a cream of Sitia xygalo. A Chania boureki is made with the thick yoghurt cheese of Chania and black sesame. Graviera saganaki arrives under a marmalade of Ierapetra cherry tomatoes, and smoked apaki pork with smoked potato purée and truffle oil.
Among the main dishes, grouper returns as a fricassée with celeriac purée, avgolemono foam and bottarga from Messolonghi. Red mullet is grilled with a couscous cannelloni, raisins, pea purée and tarama foam. Cuttlefish is braised in wine with spinach risotto and its own ink. Lamb arrives under a crust of Cretan herbs, with beans and a sauce scented with Greek coffee, at 42 euros.
The heavier plates close the list. A Black Angus fillet takes mille-feuille potatoes and a Peloponnesian truffle sauce, and a tomahawk for two comes with roasted tomato, garden vegetables and béarnaise. Lobster is grilled with lemon olive oil and Aegina pistachio oil, and charged by weight.
The cellar is weighted towards labels of the Cretan vineyard. The desserts stay Greek: galaktoboureko with sheep’s milk custard under caramelised cinnamon phyllo, a Cretan mizithra tart with fig jam and grape molasses, and a plate of anthotyro with pepper, Cretan graviera with thyme and Metsovone.
Planning a table
The pattern is April to October, daily, lunch and dinner, so the room runs the length of the Cretan season and closes for the winter. A meal is 50 to 70 euros a head, and prices on the 2026 cartes include municipal tax and VAT. The fish of the day is sold by weight at 11 euros per 100g, served with grilled vegetables from the hotel’s garden and baby potatoes, and it is cooked four ways: grilled, baked in a salt crust, as carpaccio, or in the oven with Ierapetra cherry tomatoes, capers, garlic and Vidiano wine. One evening a week is given over to the catch, under the name “Fisher’s Evening”. Guests on a dine-around arrangement reach most of the dinner carte on their plan, with a marked set of dishes, the lobster, the tomahawk and the Black Angus among them, carrying a supplement.
Who is this for
The Yacht Club suits anyone who wants the island’s own cooking without leaving the water, and anyone happy to choose a fish by weight and build the rest of the meal around it. Midday is the easier service, a long table taken between swims on the beach below. The evening is the fuller one, with lobster and Black Angus on the carte and a list of Cretan labels to read through. The tables are in the open above the cove, and the pace is unhurried at both services.
