See also: The ouzo still flows at Yanni's Greek Restaurant
Pulling into the parking lot, I got the distinct impression that I had driven farther than any of that evening's customers to get to Yianni's. Although it wasn't busy, there were more customers inside than cars outside. A couple of dudes in Affliction T-shirts waited on a couch for their take-out orders; other guests spread themselves thin in the sparsely tabled dining room -- some reading newspapers, others quietly eating with a few words thrown out between bites.Two young cooks took orders with an economic use of words -- "chicken or pork?" "sandwich or plate?" -- and equally efficient movements around the kitchen, dropping fry baskets into hot oil, shaving thin curls of meat from the gyros rotisserie. We sat at a table and watched an almost silent shuffle of diners come and go, the traffic sounds of Colfax muffled by the big front window, the muted TVs tuned to a soccer game that no one watched.
Our food arrived all at once with a quick drop-off and retreat: glistening dolmades, a slightly deflated spanakopita (called spinach pie on the menu), mounds of fries forming buttresses between sandwich halves and chunks of grilled pork. My sandwich was a surprise: Why I didn't expect a grilled gyros sandwich thick with molten mozzarella when I ordered the gyros melt is beyond me. But that's what I got, and it was good, just like its namesake patty melt, only with a garlicky, toothsome beef and lamb blend compliments of Devanco Foods ("Chicago's favorite"), the brand proudly announced on several wall-mounted posters. Despite my initial confusion, this Greek-American amalgamation proved to be a grand idea in grill-cook cleverness. The pork souvlaki, almost as certainly outsourced as the gyros, wasn't bad, either, if maybe a little dry. A dose of tzatziki cured that and added rich yogurt tang to the char-grilled and well- seasoned bites of meat. The sauce seemed fresh-made, or at least well-sourced. Yianni's scatters in enough homestyle Greek touches to keep its food from drifting into greasy-spoon territory. The dolmades are as good as any from a grocery with a decent deli -- firm and minty, if not quite worthy of a grandmother's praise. The spinach pie was stuffed full of cheesy spinach, but was probably warmed in a microwave. No matter. Real kalamata olives, unpitted, and cubes of mild feta cheese accented the souvlaki plate and I cleaned it except for a few scraps of iceberg lettuce.This is all a place like Yianni's needs to be: cheap, filling, spiked with occasional bursts of genuine flavor. The dudes in their black T-shirts, the guy hiding behind his newspaper, the young couple who got a deal on some nearby Lakewood real estate -- these people left happy, and so did I. Not exactly fast food, not the labor of a highly trained kitchen brigade, a meal at Yianni's falls somewhere in between -- like this stretch of Colfax that's not a destination but a just link between other places.
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