Oia

Strung along the northern tip of the caldera rim, Oia is the village whose blue domes and whitewashed cubes the whole world has photographed, and at dusk the lanes around the castle fill with people waiting for the famous sunset. Behind that postcard, though, the dining has quietly become the most ambitious on the island: Michelin-pedigree kitchens and cliff-edge tasting rooms have settled into the old captains' houses and cave hotels stacked down toward Ammoudi. Tables here trade on the view as much as the plate, perched where the Aegean drops away to the volcano and the burnt-out islets of the bay. It is Santorini at its most polished and its most crowded, best understood early in the morning or late after the crowds thin.