Koozina Mediterranean Cuisine

Two people at the same table rarely want the same thing, and Koozina is built for exactly that table. One diner can stay on the Greek side — chicken souvlaki off the grill, a gyro, a Greek salad — while another goes Levantine with shawarma, kafta and a plate of hummus, and a third assembles a meal from falafel and dips without feeling like an afterthought. The menu reaches across the Mediterranean wide enough that nobody has to negotiate. A family kitchen on Ontario Street South in Old Milton, Koozina has worked this stretch of Main Street since 2013, trading on recognizable staples and clean ingredients rather than novelty.

The grill and the platter carry the menu. The Mixed Grill Dinner is the broadest first order — shawarma, souvlaki, kafta and grilled meats gathered onto one plate, the whole kitchen in a single pass — while the Chicken Souvlaki Dinner is the cleaner read, grill and rice and salad with nothing to hide behind. Gyros and kafta anchor the dinner plates, and the same proteins fold into pitas for a quicker order. When a group would rather share than manage four separate dinners, the Ultimate Platter does the work. Sides and extra skewers let a plate be built up rather than swapped out. There is a spicier lane in the Pepperfire Chicken, and a Canadian crossover the kitchen clearly enjoys: Shawarma Poutine, fries loaded with shawarma instead of the usual gravy-and-curds routine.

What stands out is how comfortably two traditions share the menu. The Greek side — souvlaki, gyros, Greek Salad — runs alongside a Levantine one of shawarma, kafta, falafel, hummus and baba ghanoush, and neither reads as the token gesture. The vegetarian path is the clearest proof: Falafel on a Pita, a Hummus Plate, Baba Ghanoush, Spicy Hummus with Feta, all drawn from the regular menu rather than penned into a single meat-free line. Salads round out the lighter end — a Greek Salad, a Caesar — so a table isn't all grilled meat. There is no rotating specials board and no daily-feature theatre; the menu reads as a fixed thing a regular plans around.

The everyday utility is real. A kids' menu and family platters make Koozina an easy call for a mixed-age table, the kind of order where one person wants a full grill dinner and another just wants a wrap and fries. Larger gatherings get the same treatment: the platters scale a meal up without turning it into a project, and the kitchen leans event- and catering-friendly when the table outgrows the dining room. Start a group meal with a spread of dips — hummus, baba ghanoush, the spicy hummus with feta — add a Greek salad and some falafel, run the grill and platters through the middle, and finish with Baklava or a slice of vanilla cheesecake. The menu is built to be ordered that way, in courses a whole table shares.

Old Milton's Main Street is the right address for this kind of cooking — a walkable downtown stretch where a neighbourhood restaurant lives on repeat orders more than destination trips. The online path is ordering-first, built around delivery rather than a reservation book, which suits a place that does brisk takeout alongside sit-down service: a wrap grabbed on the way through, a platter ordered ahead for a table at home. The family-kitchen framing it opened with — family dining, comfort food, fresh ingredients — runs through all of it.

The throughline is range held inside one frame. Greek on one side, Levantine on the other, a vegetarian spread that stands on its own, Baklava to close — broad without scattering. The menu hasn't reinvented itself across more than a decade on Ontario Street South, and that steadiness is the point: the souvlaki and the shawarma come out the same on a quiet Tuesday as on a full Saturday, which is the plain promise a comfort-food kitchen makes and the reason a neighbourhood keeps one nearby.