Stathis Grill

Stathis Grill cooks like it cannot decide whether it is a Greek kitchen or a Windsor diner, so it has settled the question by being both at once. At one table, a souvlaki dinner of two marinated pork skewers; at the next, a bacon cheeseburger; across the way, a bowl of chicken lemon rice soup going down before the mains land. All of it leaves the same College Avenue line, which runs a Greek menu and a full diner side by side and treats neither as the warm-up act. More than eighty dishes sit on that menu, enough that a mixed table can land on one restaurant without anyone settling.

The Greek half carries the name. Flaming Cheese Saganaki comes out hot and salty with pita to tear and share; the Gyro Pita and Souvlaki Pita are wrapped around homemade tzatziki, onions, and tomatoes; Mediterranean Chicken plates two grilled marinated breasts against a choice of two sides. The grill keeps going past the staples — a Gyros and Chicken Combo, a Steak Pita, a pan-seared tilapia for anyone who wants fish — and a Gyro Poutine that drops gyro meat over fries and gravy, the menu's clearest handshake between Athens and a Canadian diner. Spinach Pie and Cheese Pie are folded into flaky homemade filo, and the Stathis Feta Fries disappear under black olives, tomatoes, onions, feta, and Greek dressing. There is a Greek salad with beets, a Meze for Two of homemade sausage, both pies, and tzatziki on one sharing plate, and a chicken lemon rice soup that pairs with almost any pita. Baklava and rice pudding close it out, the obvious calls and the right ones.

The diner half holds its own line and never apologizes for it. A Lamb Burger arrives under lettuce, tomato, onion, and garlic sauce; there is a Turkey Clubhouse stacked with roasted turkey and bacon, a Chicken Parmesan over penne or spaghetti, a Greek Omelette folded with peppers, onions, and feta. The Lamb Burger is the tell — lamb and garlic sauce on a bun, Greek enough for the souvlaki crowd and familiar enough for whoever walked in wanting something handheld. None of this chases a trend or a tasting-menu reputation; the pitas, the two-side dinners, the soups, and the sandwiches give the menu the practical, filling shape a neighbourhood restaurant needs to earn weeknight orders instead of special occasions. Prices stay in everyday territory, part of why Stathis reads as a weekly habit more than a night out. Stathis Grill is a Greek diner in the full meaning of both words, cooking its heritage and feeding its neighbourhood off the same line.

That breadth is built for a full table. Vegetarians have real routes through the menu — a Veggie Pita with beets, cucumber, and feta, the spinach-and-feta pie, a village salad — rather than a single token plate, and a kids menu keeps the youngest diners fed without a fight. Breakfast runs on eggs, omelettes, and home fries, with Sunday opening earlier than the rest of the week to give the morning a proper window. Much of the food is built to travel, so takeout and delivery are central to how the restaurant runs — though the same plates fill the dining room for the nights a family sits down: a birthday, a post-game crowd, an ordinary Tuesday. Stathis Grill has cooked this way on College Avenue since 2013, out in Windsor's West End near the university and Sandwich Town, with a family-dining approach it has never dressed up: Greek food made with care, pointed at families, friends, celebrations, and weeknights alike.

For all that range, the everyday rhythm is plain. Regulars build the same orders and lean on the kitchen the way you lean on a diner you already trust — a pita and a bowl of lemon rice soup at lunch, a souvlaki dinner when appetite beats grazing, feta fries set in the middle for everyone to reach. The daily specials are not printed anywhere; you ask, and the kitchen tells you what it cooked that day. That unwritten question — what is good today? — is the closest thing Stathis Grill keeps to a fixed menu.