Philoxenia Mr. D’s Restaurant and Bar sits on a rather forlorn corner across from Starbucks headquarters in Sodo. I’ve ridden my bicycle past it dozens of times on my way to and from work without giving it much thought beyond “They misspelled gyros.” (Their sign advertises the “best yeeros in town”—although I later learned it’s actually an Australian spelling.) But Mr. D’s also looks funky enough to seem like it might serve cheap, delicious Greek food. So on a recent afternoon I stopped in for lunch to investigate—and ended up in a sprawling, three-hour conversation with Mr. D himself, Demetrios Moraitis.
It turns out that Philoxenia is an incredibly apt name for his restaurant. It means a “love of strangers,” and I’ve never encountered anyone who so quickly turns strangers into friends. Eighty-year-old Moraitis impresses customers with his bouzouki skills, gives his employees good-natured shit, swears with gusto, and is basically the most convivial dude ever.
To open the floodgates of conversation, all it took was for Kathy, the seasoned waitress who presides over the dining room, to mention to Moraitis that I’d ordered a glass of the only Greek wine they had on hand—which the waitstaff apparently abhor (“extremely dry”) and Moraitis adores. It started innocently enough, with some idle chatter about wine: He makes his own from grapes he grows in Ballard, he likes Retsina but doesn’t carry it because he says it only tastes right straight from the barrel, etc.
But before long, Moraitis was showing me photos of his gyro sculptures. That’s right, the man makes sculptures of famous people out of gyro meat. Let me repeat that so it sinks in gradually and doesn’t just blow your mind into tiny pieces of brain shrapnel: HE MAKES SCULPTURES OF FAMOUS PEOPLE OUT OF GYRO MEAT. Bill and Hillary? Yup. And Monica, too. Zorba the Greek? Check. Mona Lisa? His finest masterpiece. The man also made a full-size snow sculpture of Socrates alongside his family during the snowstorm of November 1985. And he painted a good chunk of the restaurant’s hangings, including a stunning rendition of the waterfront in his hometown on the island of Tinos. Oh! And the restaurant’s columns! He sculpted them out of PVC pipes and plaster and they’re ridiculously detailed. Behold:
He’s so convivial, in fact, he even put up with John Wayne. According to Moraitis, when Wayne was filming McQ, he’d bang on Mr. D’s door and yell, “Get up, you Greek!” so as to be let in to make himself a pot of coffee. “I feed those motherfuckers for six weeks on credit! And every day he come and wake me up like that!” said Mr. D, shaking his head in exasperation. I’m not sure if the story is accurate, but I liked the way he told it. He’s a great storyteller.
Even seemingly boring stories, like the one about Moraitis getting caught smoking by his super rigorous swim coach as a youth, got jazzed up. “He give me a smack so hard, I spun around like in the movies!” And here he illustrated the motion, twirling about on the sidewalk before casually taking a drag of his cigarette and settling into a lower tone to tell me, very seriously, how much his coach meant to him and how much he looks forward to visiting him when he retires. Moraitis is comical, to be sure, but also aware of it, enabling him to be poignant when he desires.
By the second hour of our conversation, I felt like I’d been eating there three days a week for 10 years. Moraitis showed me all of his paintings, explaining the artistic motivation behind each. He regaled me with classic theme songs from such disparate gems as The Third Man, Zorba the Greek, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Moraitis makes his restaurant more than just a Greek diner with cheap beer and ample portions. He makes it a hangout. The second time I went there with my friend, who’s a singer, he showed her his hidden music room and talked her into an impromptu rendition of “Son of a Preacher Man” in the middle of our souvlaki dinner (which was, incidentally, the best thing I’ve had there by far). Afterward, he came and sat at our table and talked to us about Greek mythology while we finished our baklava, hopping up to grab a statuette of Medusa that he had lying around in order to illustrate a point.
But for all his love of strangers, Mr. D would prefer not to be famous. In fact, he’s probably not happy about the fact that I wrote this. And I wouldn’t have, but he’s trying to sell the place so he can go find his swim coach and paint and sculpt and live happily ever after. And besides, it’d be a shame if no one else got to eat meat that was, in spirit if not in reality, once part of Bill Clinton’s face.
