Bikini
Beach Bar

Malia has a loud reputation, and most of it belongs to the club streets set back from the water. Bikini Beach Bar spends its days on the other side of that reputation, out on the actual sand at the Ammos Beach Hotel, facing the sea rather than the strip. It calls itself an all day spot, and the schedule backs that up, running from an 8 in the morning coffee to a 2 in the morning last drink. That single unbroken stretch of hours is the thing to understand about it, because it means the place is a cafe, a lunch spot, a cocktail bar and a shisha lounge depending only on when you show up.

Our honest position, the same one we hold across the Crete club directory, is that the eastern resort coast is thick with beach bars and the ones worth naming are the ones with a clear character. Bikini earns its line by being the relaxed, beach facing option in a town famous for the opposite.

The rhythm here is set by those long hours. Early on it is a quiet beach cafe, coffee and the sound of the water, the kind of morning that has nothing to do with the Malia most people picture. Around midday the kitchen wakes up and the menu turns to light summer plates you can eat on the terrace or have carried down to your spot on the sand, and the bar starts pouring. By late afternoon the cocktails are the main event, and after dark the shisha comes out and the music leans in, so the same deck that served your flat white is now a low key evening scene under the lights.

For a food and scene wanderer, the shisha is the detail that separates Bikini from the row of interchangeable beach bars either side of it. It gives the place a reason to linger past sunset without turning into a nightclub, a middle gear that Malia does not offer much of. Recent visitors keep returning to two things in their write ups, the cocktails and the service, and on a busy resort beach in high summer a bar that gets named for looking after people is worth flagging.

Where it falls short is honesty about what it is not. This is a comfortable, sociable beach bar, not a destination in its own right, and it does not publish a single firm price, so the sunbed and spend questions come down to what you agree on the day. If you came to Malia for the legendary club night, that happens on the streets behind the beach, not here, and the sea view that makes Bikini pleasant by day also means it catches the general bustle of one of Crete’s busiest resort towns.

Malia beach is a long, broad band of pale sand on the north coast resort strip, shallow enough close in to suit families in the day and lively enough to keep a run of bars and tavernas busy along its back edge. The town itself splits in two, the old village and the beach on one side and the club streets on the other, and Bikini sits firmly on the calmer beach side. For the wider context of where this coast turns loud and where it stays easy, our guide to the party beaches of Crete sets Malia in its place.

Malia sits about forty minutes east of Heraklion along the main north coast road, past Hersonissos and Stalis, and the airport at Heraklion is the usual gateway. Frequent buses run the resort strip through the season, so a hire car is handy rather than essential, and Bikini is on the beach at the Ammos Beach Hotel, an easy walk from the seafront. Booking is simple. A daytime spot on the open sand is walk up, while a table on a busy evening or a group is worth arranging ahead through the bar’s own site or by phone, since the late hours draw a crowd.

Rather have it sorted before you fly? Leave your date and party size in the form and we will check with Bikini Beach Bar for you, reporting back what they can hold and how beds and tables work that week, at no charge.