Some guest houses serve dinner. Others sit you down at a table. Maison Meltem is the second kind, and the reason is one man: Giannis Manios, who cooks every meal served here himself, from the morning buffet to the evening menu.
From Heraklion to Lyon, and back
Giannis was born in Heraklion. Crete is his home island — he knows it by its coves, its ancient sites and its tavernas, and he still talks about it as an island waiting to be discovered. The craft, though, was learned elsewhere: four years of school in Athens, studying pastry and cookery side by side, then Mediterranean cuisine in several Greek establishments.
He then went abroad to work — England, Germany, France — and travelled extensively, adapting his dishes to the culture of the people he was cooking for. That attentiveness still shapes his cooking today: the evening menu is Cretan, but Giannis always keeps the people around the table in mind.
In Lyon he rounded out his craft. After a spell at the Institut Paul Bocuse, he worked at the brasserie Le Nord, one of the Bocuse houses in the city. He then ran his own restaurant, Resto Halle, in the Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse, for three and a half years.
Then he came home. Opening a guest house above Agia Pelagia was never a given: Giannis and Olivier got there the long way round — restaurateurs first, then guesthouse hosts — and Maison Meltem, which opened in 2024, is where that road led, on the island one of them was born on. The house is young; the trade of the people who run it is not.
The first meal of the day
Breakfast is included in the price of every room, and it is served each morning in the shade of the olive trees, facing the sea: a Cretan and continental buffet, with a few à la carte options alongside. It is the one meal that comes round every single day, and the least hurried of them all. Nobody is rushed: the coffee goes on, the bay fills with light, and the day gets planned right there at the table.
Three evenings a week, one menu
On Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings — and on those three evenings only — Giannis serves a single Cretan set menu, by reservation. There is nothing to choose from: you sit down and eat what he has cooked that day. Local produce takes centre stage, cooked in the house’s own olive oil.
Dinner comes in two forms. At the hosts’ own long table, in a spirit of exchange and good company: this is where conversation flows between neighbouring guests, and where you leave with the name of the cove they found the day before. Or, for a quieter dinner, at tables for two on the terrace facing the Aegean, under the pergola, around the olive tree.
Since dinner happens on those three evenings only, and since there is one menu and no other, it pays to put your name down early with Giannis and Olivier.
What the house does not do
It does not serve lunch. Maison Meltem is a guest house, not a restaurant: the pool bar stays open at midday, and the village of Agia Pelagia, with its tavernas and its restaurant-lined bay, is a few minutes away by car. The day is built around two meals — the morning one, and the evening one three times a week. In between there is the pool, the sea and the beaches below.
The table as an information desk
“Maison Meltem is our chance to meet other travellers — around the bar, the pool or the fire pit lounge — to share our experiences and compare notes,” say Giannis and Olivier. The long table on dinner evenings is where that really happens: people arrive having crossed paths at the pool, and leave with a plan for tomorrow.
It is also where the chef becomes an islander again. Crete is his, and he knows which beach to reach early in high season, which ancient sites are worth the drive, which taverna repays the detour. That kind of advice is not in the guidebook; it is handed over at the table, between two courses, by someone who knows the island intimately.
The practical detail — what is included, how to book dinner, what happens at midday — is on the table page. And for somewhere to sleep above the bay before you come down for dinner, everything is here: our rooms and suites.
