Demetre's Family Eatery

The Stratford table that cannot agree on dinner has a standard answer, and has had one for years: Demetre's Family Eatery, where a craving for souvlaki and a craving for fish and chips can settle in at the same table without anyone giving ground. This is the family-owned eatery on Ontario Street that solves the mixed-table problem — the grandparent who wants liver and onions, the child who wants a burger, the diner who came for moussaka — by simply cooking all of it. What keeps that range from scattering is the Greek thread the kitchen runs through nearly everything.

That thread is homemade tzatziki and feta, and it turns up well beyond the obvious plates. It is folded into Demetre's Burger, where feta and house tzatziki sit on an otherwise straightforward patty; it dresses the char-broiled Chicken or Pork Souvlaki, served over rice with Greek salad; it arrives beside the lightly breaded calamari and inside the Gyros on a Pita. The deeper Greek dishes anchor the menu — moussaka layered with potato, eggplant, zucchini, and ground beef under béchamel; spanakopita wrapped in phyllo; a Greek salad built on feta and a house dressing. The tzatziki is made in house and turns up often enough to read as a signature rather than a condiment. Even breakfast carries the accent: order the spinach-and-feta omelette, or the Opa Greek-style omelette with feta, tomato, and green pepper, and the same hand is on the plate.

Around that core runs the comfort-food menu a family eatery lives on. New York striploin with sautéed mushrooms or onion rings, southern fried chicken, fish and chips in homemade batter, liver and onions, fettuccine alfredo, butternut squash ravioli in a butter sauce, French onion soup under cheddar and mozzarella. For lighter appetites there is the Berryfields salad — romaine with strawberries, blueberries, walnuts, and raspberry vinaigrette — alongside soups and seafood plates such as fillet of sole and ocean perch. Breakfast and lunch get their own daytime service rather than a token nod: omelettes, the Breakfast Special of two eggs with pancakes and sausages, salads, sandwiches, and wraps, served before the kitchen turns to dinner. None of it reaches to be clever, and that is the honest read on the kitchen — it cooks the dishes people actually order on a weeknight, then does them with enough care, and in portions generous enough, to bring a table back. The range is wide enough to carry a kids menu and a seniors menu without either feeling like an afterthought.

The eatery has run on Ontario Street since 1996, and it is still in the family that built it. Leah and Demetre Carangounis are the owners — names local reporting confirmed as the restaurant approached its thirtieth year. From the start it has cooked for Stratford and the surrounding area, and for the steady churn of visitors a festival town pulls in. The weekly rhythm has a logic of its own: breakfast and lunch until two, a pause, then dinner from four, the doors closed on Mondays and the full breakfast landing on weekend mornings. Reservations are the right move for dinner and for groups, the other tell of a kitchen that has spent decades learning how its town actually shows up.

That schedule is built for how Stratford eats around its stages — a family lunch before an afternoon errand, an early dinner before a show, a weekend breakfast with no clock on it. The licensed dining room makes it an easy landing for theatre visitors and locals alike, and the draw is not novelty but reliability: the dependable souvlaki, the burger with feta and tzatziki, the moussaka that tastes the way it did last winter. On a street named for the province it sits in, that has been enough to keep the doors open since 1996.