Know before you go
How a Greek taverna table actually works
A Greek table is not a sequence of courses. It is a set of plates that arrive when they are ready and belong to everyone.
The single most useful adjustment a visitor can make is to stop ordering per person. Dishes are shared, they arrive in whatever order the kitchen finishes them, and a second round is normal. Order less than feels right, eat, and order again.
The second adjustment is the clock. Lunch is an afternoon activity and dinner starts at nine. A taverna busy at seven is a taverna feeding visitors; the same place at ten is feeding the island.
Reading a taverna
Look for the trays. Many tavernas cook a set of dishes in the morning, mostly vegetables in oil, and keep them warm rather than listing them. Asking to see what is cooked today is standard practice and reliably better than ordering from the printed menu.
The other signal is the length of the menu. A short one means the kitchen cooks; a long laminated one with photographs means the freezer does.
What the islands do differently
Island cooking is not one cuisine. Cheese, herbs, capers and whatever grows on the particular rock change the food from island to island, and the small islands with almost no tourism often eat best because nobody has had a reason to adjust for foreign taste.
The shape of the day
Breakfast is small and often just coffee. The serious eating happens in the middle of the afternoon and again late at night, with a long flat stretch between them when the heat makes anything else pointless. Kitchens close in that gap, which catches out anyone arriving off a lunchtime ferry hungry.
The bakery covers it. Every village has one, it opens early, and it sells the cheese pies and bread that fill the hours the tavernas do not. On a small island it is also where the news is, which is how visitors find out that the boat is late before the port does.
What people actually drink
House wine comes from a barrel and is ordered by weight: a quarter, a half or a kilo, in a jug. It costs very little and ranges from rough to genuinely good depending on who made it, and asking whether it is the family's own is a reasonable and usually welcome question. Bottled Greek wine has improved out of recognition and the assyrtiko and moschofilero on an island list are worth the step up.
Ouzo and tsipouro are not aperitifs so much as an excuse for small plates: order one and something to eat arrives with it, and a table of four ordering three rounds of ouzo has effectively ordered dinner. Coffee is its own institution. A freddo espresso or freddo cappuccino, shaken cold and served over ice, is what most of Greece drinks from May to October, and it is ordered sweet unless you say otherwise.
Paying, and what arrives unasked
The bill comes when it is asked for and not before, because moving a table on is not what the place is for. Service is included and small change left on the table is the normal gesture. Bread and cover are charged as a line item of a euro or two a head. And something usually arrives at the end that was not ordered, most often a plate of fruit or a small dessert: it is not a mistake and it is not billed.