Nikos & Eleni
1978 — 2004Founders. Nikos ran the floor, Eleni the kitchen. Neither took a night off in twenty-six years.
Since 1978
Steki means a place of one's own — the corner you keep coming back to, where the owner knows how you like your coffee.
In 1978 Nikos Papadakis pulled six wooden tables into an alley behind the Venetian harbour. He had no menu, no sign, and no reservations book. Word travelled the way word does in a small city — over glasses of raki, from neighbour to neighbour.
His wife Eleni cooked what her mother had cooked in the mountain village of Anogeia. Boureki in the summer, gemistá when the tomatoes came in, slow-braised lamb when the weather turned. There were no printed prices. You paid what felt fair.
Nearly fifty years later, the alley looks much the same. The tables have been replaced twice. The recipes never have.
Steki sits on Agion Deka, a narrow stone lane a few minutes' walk from the Venetian harbour. Tables spill out under the whitewashed wall in the evening, and the courtyard behind the kitchen — added by Maria in the mid-2000s — stays shaded by vines through the hottest part of the Cretan summer.
Founders. Nikos ran the floor, Eleni the kitchen. Neither took a night off in twenty-six years.
Their daughter. Trained in Athens, returned to Crete, added the courtyard and the wine list — but kept every recipe.
The grandson. Cooks the way his grandmother taught him. Still refuses to write down the boureki recipe.