Tag: Nick Poulos

“Gentrification brings a different level of competition, and typically, the competition has more money behind it than a small, standalone business,” Daddy D'z owner Christianah Coker-Jackson says. “So, they can inundate [would-be diners] with the advertising, the bright lights, the fancy stuff we just don’t have.”

Manager Evie Poulos estimates that they sell upwards of 200 gyros every day. But despite the restaurant’s reputation for their Greek sandwiches, gyros weren’t even on the menu when Nick’s opened.

Nick Poulos, founder of Edgewood's Greek sandwich shop Nick’s Food To Go, is retiring, but the restaurant, which opened in 1994, will go on with other family members at the helm. Nick’s wife Eleni (or Helen) Poulos, who's been cooking since day one, will run the kitchen, while daughter Evie Poulos will take over managerial duties.

After nearly twenty years dishing out gyros and Greek salads, Nick Poulos no longer looks quite as frisky as his cartoonish portrait painted on the large sign outside his business. His bristly mustache turned gray long ago, and at sixty-nine, he moves a little more slowly. But his carryout restaurant continues to thrive in a dreary area near Daddy D’z BBQ Joynt just west of Oakland Cemetery. In the nineties, Poulos’s brother ran a liquor store a block and a half away from the restaurant—then an empty lot—and suggested the location. The package store is long gone, but neighborhood loyalists have kept Nick’s Food to Go busy for years, largely through word of mouth.