This Greek restaurant is collecting regulars

Greek Isles Grille & Taverna strives to embody Greek hospitality

Xenia. It roughly translates to “guest-friendship.” Greek hospitality, which anyone who’s visited the country can tell you all about, is in large part based on this ideal.

At Preston Royal’s Greek Isles Grille & Taverna, xenia is a foundational aspect of the customer experience. Owner Chris Kostas and his wife/business partner, Amanda, aim to turn neighbors into customers, customers into regulars and regulars into family.

“If you go to Greece and visit, you can meet somebody, a total stranger, and they’ll invite you to their home and cook you dinner,” Chris says. “So that’s the kind of feel that we like to have people feel when they come in. And it just makes it special. Since I’m here all day, every day, I feel like people that come in are a little bit more than just customers. They’re like family.”

Chris grew up in the business. His father came over from Greece when he was 17 years old and immediately entered the restaurant industry, as did his uncles. He remembers “many a night there” when his father managed a Greek restaurant on Bachman Lake in the 1980s and eventually helped open the original Greek Isles in Plano with the elder Kostas in the ’90s.

The Preston Royal location opened in 2014 and remained open until the 2019 tornado devastated most of the shopping center and surrounding area. Chris was in the kitchen when the storm first started picking up and didn’t realize exactly what was happening outside the restaurant. Then his mother called him.

“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I open the back door of the kitchen, I look out, I hear sirens, see things flying in the air, so this looks like it could be pretty bad,” Chris says. “We had some guests, and just kind of tried to calmly get them to move to a safer area. They all had to grab their glass of wine and start walking about halfway through the restaurant, and all of a sudden, the power went out. Everyone drops their wine glass, like, ‘Where are we going?’ Our walk-in cooler is kind of small, so we took everyone to the back area and just, you know, waited it out. And fortunately, everyone was OK, and we walked out into what looked like a war zone.”

Hampered by COVID-19-related delays, it took the Kostas family almost two years to reopen at Preston Royal. Chris’ father and brother stepped away from the business before the reopening, so the decision was made to shutter the Plano location after close to 30 years. On the bright side, the carnage gave Chris and Amanda a blank canvas to remodel the space with an expanded patio and brighter interior decor.

Amanda previously worked in hospitality management at bars and restaurants around Dallas and takes an active role in front-of-house operations, including the bar offering, which was also expanded following the reopening. Greek Isles’ cocktail menu includes drinks like the Palios Fashioned ($15), made with Clyde Mays Rye, Metaxa 7m, syrup and fig bitters, and the Tsipour-Go ($13), which comes with tsipouro, aperol, orange and bitters. Even with her industry experience, Mrs. Kostas has found Greek spirits to be an entirely new experience.

“That was something new for me, because I’ve been in the industry way before I met my husband, and so getting to play with all the different spirits and things like that, and they’re made with different things. Like a lot of the Greek spirits are made from grapes, so it’s all technically brandies, and so that was really fun. And just the different ways that they flavor them, or how they ferment them, that adds their own unique flavor. And then we have one mastika that’s made from the sap of a tree that’s really, really unique. It’s been a lot of fun.”

Greek Isles’ fare traditionally stuck to tried and true Greek classics, but following the reopening, expanded to include more experimental, Mediterranean fusion-esque dishes like lamb tacos ($13), which come served with jalapeño satziki, radish and feta. Mezedakia, or small plates the Kostases liken to tapas, were also added.

Flashy, experimental dishes are good snares for first-time customers, but Greek Isles’ regulars come for Greek classics like gyro ($17), chicken lemonati ($27) and dolmas ($14), which are grape leaves filled with seasoned ground beef, rice, fennel and avgolemono sauce. Other crowd favorites include tableside flambe saganaki ($15) and lamb chops ($45).

“There’s so many things that are on the menu that are staples,” Amanda says. “If I look at one thing I’m trying to do to shorten the menu, I’m like, ‘Well, that person’s gonna come in and they’re gonna be upset.’ So the entrées and the staples we can’t mess with. We’ve added some things but haven’t taken anything away.”

Chris sources most ingredients himself and can typically be found at the Dallas Farmers Market in the early hours of the morning browsing tomatoes. It’s the way his father did it, and Amanda estimates Greek Isles only uses about five ingredients from big truck distributors.

After the Preston Royal location temporarily closed, Chris says Preston Hollow patrons would make the long drive to Plano to support the business during COVID lockdowns. Now, with the Plano location closed, Kostas says he may look at expanding to a second location up north. That way, he can get back to serving some old regulars.

“I think just that fact of having those relationships and getting to know them more than just they come in here and eat and then leave, really just makes it worth being here every day. Otherwise, I don’t think that I would want to do it,” Kostas says.