Ironically, Tselementes shunned the simple, seasonal food of his childhood in favour of the fancy dishes he learned to cook at grand hotels in Vienna and New York. Sifnos owes its reputation as a foodie island to Nicholas Tselementes, a local chef who wrote the first Greek book of recipes in 1910 (his surname has been synonymous with 'cookbook' in Greece ever since). If you visit in the morning, you’ll find staff patiently crimping dozens of bourekia – ground almonds, cloves, cinnamon and honey wrapped in pastry then drenched in icing sugar – in a sequence of precise movements perfected over a lifetime. My treats are weighed on antique scales behind the baby-blue counter. Its nougat wafers, bergamot sugar paste and amygdalota (addictive almond cookies shaped like Roman noses) have seduced the sweet-toothed since 1933 and everything is still cooked in copper pots over a wood fire. Homely decor at Theodorou's Sweet Shop David LoftusĮven after all this deliciousness, I can never quite resist stopping at the family-run Theodorou's Sweet Shop on the way home. The hotel is managed by Miltos Salemis and Isidora Chandeli, a handsome couple who know and love every inch of Sifnos, and we have become good friends.

You could spend a whole week here padding barefoot between your suite, the infinity pool, the intimate Elemis spa, and Bostani, the wildly romantic bar and restaurant, where the surrounding kitchen garden supplies many ingredients for the modern Mediterranean dishes. These days I stay at the elegant Verina Astra, where there are 16 deeply calming suites that have views of blue sky and sea, a brilliant-white village cascading over a distant hilltop and, at the bottom of the valley, the blue dome of a monastery dangling above an emerald cove. It still has that raw elemental appeal and an intense tranquillity, even though there are more cars and foreigners, a few more villas tucked in among the terraced hills and a handful of smart restaurants and hotels. The rest of Sifnos hasn't changed much either. Panagia Poulati monastery on the east coast of Sifnos David Loftus Kastro village is the kind of timeless place that barely changes between decades. A little further up the cliffside path is a new arrival: Loggia, a beautifully understated wine bar where you can perch on the whitewashed ledge, sipping biodynamic wines and sampling Cycladic cheeses to a mellow vinyl soundtrack. The heap of empty Havana Club bottles piled up inside the bar keeps getting bigger.

Here we would drink rum-and-cokes until dawn and feast on dandelion-and-feta pies from the bakery before stumbling into bed.Īlthough the bakery has gone, Kavos Sunrise is still open. The local bar, suitably named Kavos Sunrise, was run by a dude in denim hot pants and a bandana, who was known as Che because of his obsession with Cuba. Our digs may have been spartan, but we had the most sensational sunrises over the Church of Seven Martyrs, a chapel floating on an outcrop of rock, hundreds of feet below. We rented a couple of rooms in the cliff-top village of Kastro from a lascivious old codger who munched on raw garlic cloves. The first time I saw Sifnos was more than 25 years ago on a whirlwind trip with five girlfriends from five different countries. Octopus with sweet-wine reduction at Omega 3 David Loftus

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