When we first arrived in Kambos the eating out choice was either the Kourounis taverna come grocery store run by lovely Eleni or Miranda’s the small taverna at the top of the Square. Eleni does food as a sideline and it’s great but a limited choice. Miranda’s “menu” was the one dish she was serving that day.
Miranda retired and then some years ago her grandson Thomas bought up the hardware store opposite Kourounis and turned it into a restaurant. Meanwhile, Mirandas’ has had more owners than you’ve had hot dinners with its latest stewards being the family of the local murderer, a nice chap. Meanwhile 300 yards away opposite the olive press an ouzeria has opened up and it now also does great food.
Kasmbos is not a tourist village as it is half an hour from the sea. But in the tourist season it should benefit from folks passing through on their way to Kardamili or Stoupa and from Athenians coming back to a family home to escape the Citty heat. A brilliant summer might just allow all four eateries to survive. But this year has, for whatever reason, been piss poor and there has been an inevitable casualty.
Miranda’s or whatever it is called this time around had already gone to evenings only even at the weekends. But last weekend it seemed to have given up the ghost entirely and was dark
Maybe I am to blame. Olive harvesters T,J and myself sort of defected to Thomas last winter, enticed by his excellent pork steak at 7 Euro which you can see below. And my family prefer the back garden of the ouzeria where they can play backgammon ( Greek rules). So we formerly loyal customers of Mirandas under all its owners abandoned it and now it is no more.
The one blemish on the ouzeria is that I played the Vlach poem to mad lefties L and G over lunch and th owner was invited to listed. “Its Albanian “ he said. “No it’s not I said its Vlach.”. He, who as a man of Southern Greece will never have met a Vlach in his life insisted he knew better than I who have spent many holidays among the Vlachs in the North.
Given that my father’s specialist subject was the Vlachs and it was he who unearthed this poem, I think I know who is right. But the ouzeria owner was having nothing of it. I could not be bothered to argue, it would have been like arguing with uber-nationalist Joshua on the merits of Welsh independence.
