If it hadn’t been recommended to us by one of our favorite stone crab fisherman, Sam Hart, we most likely would have never stepped foot in Mama Maria’s. Normally when a restaurant’s sign indicates authentic, our alarm bells go off, but the Original Mama Maria’s Greek Cuisine is exactly what they claim to be: authentic.

Maria Koursiotis, aka Mama, is in the kitchen cooking every night and has been since she opened her restaurant in the late 1970’s. She came from Kalymnos, Greece to Tarpon Springs in 1961, following her sponge diver husband John “Sfeeka,” who made the trip in 1959. Unfortunately, his career was cut short in 1978 when he got the bends, a crippling decompression sickness that afflicts many divers. It was then that Mama Maria opened up her first restaurant.

Tarpon Springs is a small Greek fishing village on the Anclote River, two miles from the Gulf of Mexico. It’s renowned for having the highest percentage of Greek-Americans of any city in the states. While the sponge diving industry still survives, most of the truly authentic Greek restaurants have not. Small shops selling sponges, olive oil soaps, shells and tacky t-shirts have replaced family run restaurants that specialized in pastitso, boiled shrimp, and Retsina wine. Mama Maria was one of those small restaurants across the street from the waterfront, in an area referred to as “the docks.” As the tourists moved in, Mama moved away from the docks and opened just outside of the village with the intention of catering more to locals that visitors.

The restaurant is completely family run with Mama cooking and baking everything, her sons Mike and Costa running the restaurant, and her niece, Antonia, waiting tables.

Mama Maria’s has an extensive menu of traditional Greek items including dips, locally caught seafood, gyros, and Greek specialty items such as pastitso, mousaka, dolmades. The octopus was delightfully tender and charred; the lightly fried smelts (the one fish not locally caught) were large, slightly sweet and addictive; a combo plate of skordalia, tarmosalata, tzatiki, and hummus with homemade fried pita chips was an excellent way to start; one of the daily specials, the whole grilled Red Snapper had a crispy, charred skin with juicy, tender flesh.

The Greek salad is served Tarpon Springs-style with a mound of potato salad as the base. That may sound odd to traditionalists, but it’s standard in the Tampa Bay Area ever since a local Greek restaurant started serving it that way back in 1920’s.

Sharing is the best way to navigate through the menu. If you have enough room, try one of the desserts baked by Mama (baklava, rice pudding and yalahtobouriko, filo stuffed with custard).

As we drove to dinner at Mama Maria’s, we thought that either we will have found a local gem or if the food wasn’t good, we would have a nice catch-up with our friends. Glad to say, we found a gem.