Did your parents’ cooking influence how you cook now? Is that how the idea for Souvla started?

Not so much here at Souvla. My mother was a great cook, though she’d never admit it. Both my grandfathers were exceptional cooks as well. One did it professionally and ran a restaurant outside Boston for a long time, and the one from Greece was just naturally talented in the kitchen.

So we grew up here eating a lot of the traditional Greek dishes—we don’t really serve too much of that here at Souvla— but the idea was to sort of reimagine the gyro or the souvlaki sandwich, without having to adhere to any rules. I make no qualms about the fact that Souvla is authentic or traditional—because it’s not. But we really wanted to bring some of those traditional flavors back, and take the product back to basics, so it starts with our move away from the mystery cone meat gyro.

That was something that when came to the states in the 70’s, even at that point it was sort of bastardized, and it was something that I was always conflicted with, especially in the last ten years, because you had no idea what it was! There was definitely some flavor profiles that were great about it, whether it was the fluffiness of the pita, or the cooling of the tzatziki, and then some of the spiciness of the lamb meat itself, but it was kind of like eating a hotdog—it’s delicious but I also feel like I’m gonna be sick.

So we went back to the drawing board. I was living in the city with a roommate and we had a nice backyard in the Richmond, and we thought for fun lets get a spit and start roasting whole animals. We were both in the restaurant business, so I was able to order animals easily, so every 6-8 weeks we would have these big potluck parties in the backyard, and I’d roast a whole animal, traditional Greek style like we’d do at Easter, and a lot of restaurant industry people would come and bring booze and food, and we’d have a big party.

After the first party, we were cleaning up the next day and someone brought some pita, we had a beautiful heirloom salad and I had some left over lamb I had roasted the day before, so I put together this sandwich. And the light bulb went off— this is delicious, why can’t I find this anywhere?

This started the quest for Souvla, it was about a five year process. I was working full time, and going back and forth between models, wondering if it’s a good idea or a bad idea—but here we are now, a year and a half in.

I see! So in a way, you’re mixing traditional influences with a modern spin?

Well our meat is both traditional and non-traditional, if that makes sense. Typically, gyro is made with pork shoulder or loin, stacked tall for cooking, then shaved off. Then there’s also souvlaki, which is chunks of meat skewered, then grilled to order. Both are usually served on a pita, with yogurt. Traditionally it’s with tomato, red or white onion and tzatziki, and that’s about it.

So we took the meat process in a different direction. We follow an adapted version of the Cypriot style of barbecue, called kontosouvla, which focuses on, instead of vertically roasted meat, the horizontal roasted meat, and is usually in larger chunks. So we took that to a next level, and went back to basics, focusing only whole muscle cut of naturally raised meat. We roast whole lam leg, whole pork shoulder, and whole chicken, and that’s done on the rotisserie. That’s just a simple dry roast, salt pepper, and, as per the beauty of the rotisserie, the meats are constantly bathing in their own juices and fat. The meat comes off, is pulled down, chopped up and marinated in a very traditional Greek marinade of olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, and garlic. So we bring a lot of classic Greek flavors into the meat in that way.

The pita is also very traditional. We developed our own pita recipe and is now made for us exclusively by a South San Franciscan baking company. It’s the best Greek style pita I’ve seen outside of Greece. The next best I’ve seen in the U.S. comes from the east coast. But it’s a frozen product, loaded with preservatives and a lot of crap in there, whereas our stuff is made fresh every morning and delivered to the restaurant.

We took some liberties with some of the sauces in the sandwiches. Our pork sandwich is our homage to the original—it has tomatoes, cucumber, feta cheese, and we do a mint yogurt, similar to tzatziki. The rest of our sandwiches are from elsewhere, in terms of drawing inspiration. The chicken kind of deviates a bit, you wouldn’t normally see oranges in Greek cooking, but I think most people enjoy that, it brings a brightness and a freshness to the sandwich. We also created the “Granch” dressing, which is Greek ranch dressing. We thought, “ranch dressing is obviously delicious, but how can we make this Greek?” and so we made a ranch dressing but used Greek yogurt as the base.

The veggie sandwich totally went off as well. I mean, this is a meat centric restaurant but we wanted to offer something for vegetarians, and wanted to do it in a way where it wasn’t just an after thought. What’s so nice to see now is we have a bunch of vegetarian and vegan customers who dine at Souvla on a regular basis. That sandwich is a white sweet potato, with a garlic yogurt, and we bring in some Greek flavors with Kalamata olives, but we round it out with walnuts, which is more traditionally used in Greek pastry— so the result is a nice sweet savory combination. And of course, all our sandwiches can be ordered as salads. That was actually a late addition to the menu, but those have really taken off as well.

We also do Greek Fries, drawing inspiration from Greek roasted potato— we just applied those methods to a french fry. They come out the fryer, tossed in olive oil, oregano and lemon juice then we add a bit of this great salty cheese called Mizithra. We do a traditional roasted potato as well, which is roasted with all the meat drippings and is really delicious.

Then with dessert we really had a lot of fun. Dessert in Greece is usually pastry based, but because of the space and how much resources it takes to make things like baklava, we knew it couldn’t be done. Greek yogurt in the U.S. market has blown up in the last five years. It went from being something you’d never see or hear about, maybe only if you’re Greek-American, and now it’s become a household staple. We wanted to take advantage of its new popularity, so we created a frozen Greek yogurt. We take the Greek yogurt and run it through a frozen yogurt machine, and then to add different toppings. We do crumbled baklava, this great sour cherry syrup called vissino, wildflower honey from Crete, and then my personal favorite—Greek olive oil with sea salt. And that’s it!

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