When he started as a cook for the Paphos Beach Hotel in 1978, there was only one other hotel on the harbour. ‘The harbour was mostly a fishing village then, and housing was very hard to find,’ executive chef Nikos Kimonos recalls. The hotel was smaller then—it had only two restaurants and its northern wing had not yet been built. As the town developed into a major tourist destination over the years, so too did the Paphos Beach Hotel grow. Kimonos was promoted to executive chef in 1987. Trained in the French culinary tradition, he oversaw menus that used its techniques to prepare locally sourced seafood, meat, and produce. Big changes came in 2003 with a major renovation and the rechristening of the hotel as Almyra. The renovation expanded the number of restaurants on site to four. The addition of Notios, with its distinctive Mediterranean-Japanese fusion cuisine, required training in Japanese techniques by experts from the famed restaurant Nobu; now the hotel has three sushi chefs on staff. The addition of Almyraspa in 2007 also brought another restaurant, Eauzone, with a menu focusing on wellness. After forty years on property, Kimonos continues to see growth opportunities ahead: ‘Now we are preparing more Cypriot cuisine, using fresh local herbs in the process.’ And despite the dramatic growth of Pafos, he appreciates that it retains some of the village charm that greeted him in 1978: ‘I have only a five-minute walk to work.’

Sunday Vibezzz, our weekly summer music session at Eauzone pool bar and lounge, closes the 2018 season on 9 September. The finale is an extended session with three DJs spinning back to back. We start the groove at 15:00 with DJ Andrez P, who plays a mix of R & B tunes. Greek recording artist Harri Agnel takes over at 18:00 with his down tempo electronic music. At 21:00, resident DJ Aris finishes with a deep ethnic playlist. The party is for adults only (ages 16 and up) and closes at midnight. As usual, the Eauzone kitchen will be presenting a menu of mini burgers and sandwiches, light bites, sharing platters, and sweets and desserts. In addition to regular bar service, we offer our Gin O’Clock Menu: Order a bespoke gin and tonic by selecting from one of nine premium and four house-infused gins, one or more enhancers (nineteen kinds of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices), and one of four premium tonic waters. Our al fresco setting is perfect for enjoying a shisha session. The regular shisha lets you enjoy your choice of flavoured tobacco with our premium glass water pipe. Or, for a more complex seasoning, try a shisha cocktail: in the Citrus Gang, for example, we carefully fill the pipe with slices of orange, grapefruit, lemon, and lime and top it off with Bacardi rum. Put on your swimsuit, flip flops, and shades and toast the summer with a chill day by the pool and sea.

A staple of the taverna, rebetiko music originated in the working class ouzeria of the nineteenth century Ottoman empire. The genre synthesises Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Jewish, and Armenian influences, while the lyrics sing of love and longing and crime and poverty. In the beginning, the singers were accompanied by one or two guitars and, occasionally, the tambouras—a long-necked instrument usually with two strings tuned five notes apart. The music was considered rebellious, so government officials tried to repress its performance in the early twentieth century. This affected its instrumentation, according to Dimitris Liapis, a contemporary performer of the genre: ‘The police held raids, so musicians made a smaller instrument that could be hidden—the baglamas.’ The baglamas is a descendant of the pandoura, the long-necked lute of ancient Greece. It provides chords and rhythmic support for the ensemble. Its larger siblings, the medium-sized tzouras and the larger bouzouki, also added to the sound when policing was not so strict. After the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, ethnic Greek musicians departed the city for modern Greece and a distinctively Greek tradition began to develop. After a period of repression and neglect, the genre regained popularity in the 1970s during the Greek folk revival. Our rebetiko ensemble plays every Sunday at 19:30 at Ouzeri, our seaside taverna. Chara Aresti plays guitar and sings, Dimitris Liapis plays baglamas and sings, and they host bouzouki players from Cyprus and Greece. Reserve your table for Greek meze and take in this soulful and heart-wrenching music.
Photo credit: Photo of baglamas by Violinincognito.