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Most people meet Corfu at the airport and drive south. I went the other way, up the east coast and around the shoulder of Mount Pantokrator, and spent a day working out why the north keeps its regulars for decades while the resort strips churn through a new crowd every summer.
The short answer is that the northeast is slow. Not sleepy, slow. There is a difference, and you feel it about twenty minutes into the drive when the road stops being a road and starts being a series of decisions.
Start early, before the coast wakes up
I 
left just after seven. The light on this side of the island in the first hour is the reason to do it, low and gold across the water, with Albania close enough across the strait that you can pick out individual buildings on the far shore.
Almyros is the easy first swim. It is long, sandy underfoot and shallow a good way out, which makes it the one beach up here that works for everyone regardless of age or confidence in the water. Taverna George sits right on it, family run, and at that hour you will have the place more or less to yourself.
If the wind is up, and it does get up on this coast, Kalamaki is the sheltered alternative a few minutes along. That is the local trick: not one beach, but a pair, and you pick based on which way the sea is running that morning.
Kassiopi at mid-morning
Kassiopi is the working heart of the northeast. A horseshoe harbour, fishing boats tied up beside charter boats, a ruined Byzantine castle on the headland above, and a row of cafes that stay open long after the day-trippers leave.
Climb to the castle first while it is still cool. The walls are in poor repair and the path is uneven, so wear something other than flip flops, but the view over the harbour and back along the coast is the one worth the effort.
Then do what most visitors here end up doing at least once: rent a boat. The smaller engines can usually be hired without a boat licence, though it is worth confirming when you book. Half the coastline north and east of Kassiopi has no road access at all, and the coves that everyone photographs, the ones with four people in them at noon in August, are reachable only from the water. Kerasia and Avlaki you can drive to. The good ones you cannot.
Lunch at Agni, because that is what Agni is for
Agni Bay is three tavernas on a pebble beach and not much else, which is the appeal. Boats moor straight off the front and people swim in between courses. Toula’s sits right on the sand and is the one I would book, and yes, book, because in July and August turning up at two and hoping is optimistic.
A short way south at Kalami is The White House, which was Lawrence Durrell’s home while he was writing on Corfu in the 1930s. It is a restaurant now, on the water, and the literary pilgrimage costs you nothing extra since you were going to eat lunch anyway.
Order Corfiot rather than generic Greek while you are up here. Pastitsada, beef or rooster in spiced tomato sauce over thick pasta. Sofrito, veal with garlic and white wine. Bourdeto, fish in a peppery red sauce. If a menu leads with those instead of moussaka, someone in that kitchen is from the island.
Old Perithia in the late afternoon
Then go up. The road climbs the slopes of Pantokrator through switchbacks and olive terraces, and at the top sits Old Perithia, a 14th century village built high and inland because pirates could not be bothered to walk that far.
It was almost completely abandoned in the last century. A handful of stone houses have been brought back, a few tavernas open in season, and the rest sits half ruined among the wildflowers. On a weekday in shoulder season you can have the lanes to yourself. It is the one place on Corfu where I stopped taking photographs and just sat down.
Eat there if you can time it, then come back down in the last of the light.
Where the north actually makes sense to stay
Corfu Town is worth two days and I would not sleep there. The old town is dense, parking is a fight, and everything I have described above is a forty minute drive away, which is a long way to go home at eleven at night.
The pattern that works, and the reason most of the holiday villas in Corfu worth renting sit up this way, is basing yourself in the northeast of the island, up in the olive groves behind the coast, and treating the town as a day out. The hillsides around Vasilika and the Perithia area put you within a short run of Almyros and Kalamaki, with Kassiopi and Agios Stefanos on the other side, and Old Perithia up the hill behind you.
That is the whole day I have just described, inside a fifteen kilometre radius of a set of villas in Corfu that most visitors drive straight past, and you would still have most of the island left over.