Pantheon Restaurant

Most Greek kitchens on the Danforth treat fish as a plate of calamari and a grilled fillet. Pantheon keeps an entire section for the small fish of Greece — Gavro, Marida, Barbounia, Bakaliarakia — pan-fried whole and eaten the way they are in a seaside taverna. It is the clearest tell of what this Greektown restaurant is after: not a souvlaki house that happens to serve seafood, but a full Greek table where imported small fish and the daily Fresh Market Catch share the menu with charcoal-grilled octopus, lamb, and the cold and hot appetizers a Greek meal is built to open on.

The appetizers set the tone. Saganaki arrives sizzling and flambeed, pan-seared Kefalotyri that announces the meal before the mains land; around it sit Dolmadakia stuffed with rice and minced beef in avgolemono, Spanakotiropita in flaky phyllo, Gigantes baked beans simmered in tomato, grilled quails called Ortykia, and Garides Saganaki, shrimp in a tomato, mushroom, and feta sauce. From there the grill takes over. Classic Chicken Souvlaki Piato comes over Greek salad, Fresh Paidakia brings four lamb chops, and the kitchen will plate a Grill Mix of chicken skewer, lamb chops, and sausage or a twelve-ounce Certified Angus New York steak for the table that drifts past the Greek canon. The seafood runs just as deep — Bakaliaro Skordalia of pan-fried cod with cold garlic potato dip, a ten-ounce Atlantic salmon, the house Pantheon Shrimp, and the small fish flown in from Greece.

What the breadth says is that Pantheon has never narrowed itself to a single trick. A table can stay in classic comfort with Mousaka and slow-roasted Roast Lamb, push toward the seafood and small-fish end, or split the difference, all from one kitchen. That range is the Greektown inheritance working as intended: a Greek dining room wide enough to settle the argument between the group that wants skewers and the group that wants whole fish, with a Horiatiki village salad for the table that wants neither and a Vegetarian Souvlaki Piato of grilled mushrooms, zucchini, peppers, and eggplant for the diner who skips the meat altogether. Few places on the strip try to be this many things at once and stay coherent.

The continuity is a family one. Pantheon has cooked on the Danforth since 1997, and local reporting ties its ownership to Nick Parussis and the Parussis family, who run it as a family business rather than a chef's showcase. There is no celebrity name on the door; the kitchen is run by a chef with close to forty years in the business who is not publicly named, and the food carries the story instead of a biography. That is the honest version of the place — longtime Greek cooking held steady on a strip that has watched even its signature festival, Taste of the Danforth, falter and stall around it.

None of it asks for occasion. Weekday happy hour fills the late afternoon with discounted appetizers, the front patio takes the warm months, and an online booking page handles the planned nights, but the surest argument is the order itself: start with saganaki and a plate of small fish, let the grill carry the middle, and finish with thick Greek yogurt under honey and walnuts. Larger groups do better with a reservation than a walk-in, and the broad menu gives a mixed party enough familiar anchors to keep everyone fed. Pantheon has spent its decades being the kind of Greek restaurant a neighbourhood keeps rather than discovers — the table you return to because you already know what the kitchen will do well, and order the whole small fish anyway.