When the COVID-19 pandemic dried up their construction business, Dimitrios and John Koukounis turned to something else they knew – Greek food – to start a restaurant business in St. James on Long Island, New York. 

They had come to the United States in 1990 from a family that knew restaurants, their father running takeout spots in Greece and Germany, wrote Greater Long Island. 

“We grew up in the business, and he’s been pushing us for many years to open something like that,” Dimitrios Koukounis said. “So we took it as a sign from up above that it was time to go ahead and venture into this new restaurant business.” 

Their place is called Yeros, a twist on Gyro, an Americanized way of pronouncing the classic way of producing the Greek fast food souvlaki on a vertical rotisserie. “Yērō is the right way to say ‘gyro’ — it is a vertical rotisserie, carved meat that we shave off, so we stuck with it,” Dimitrios Koukounis said. 

“We serve it like that here, which is another thing people are going crazy for because you can’t even find that anywhere,” he added.