A Restaurateur Returns to Greektown with a Modern Greek Restaurant 15 Years After His Uncle's Establishment Burned Down

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Fifteen years after the restaurant he managed for his uncle burned down, Kosti Demos is returning to the same block to open a new Greek restaurant that he hopes can revitalize Chicago’s once-bustling Greektown. On August 29, Ithaki Estiatorio opens at 314 S. Halsted St., in a space that once housed The Parthenon, which closed in 2016 after 48 years in business. The Parthenon is among several mainstays that have closed since the Demos family lost Costa’s Greek Dining and Bar to a fire in 2010. Demos hopes Ithaki can help reverse that trend.

“We’re hoping to be able to spark a renaissance, and we’re happy to start it,” he says. “I just want more Greek-owned businesses.”

Ithaki is the latest in a spate of next-generation Greek restaurants such as Andros Taverna and Avli that have added a touch of contemporaneity and finer dining to the moussaka, souvlaki, spanakopita, and avgolemono soup of classic Greek restaurants in Chicago. It has a special focus on seafood, with whole grilled fish changing by the season alongside Dover sole carved tableside, a special Sunday fish soup, crab spaghetti, and raw options such as oysters and hamachi. It also offers the requisite Greek salad, lamb dishes, pasticcio casserole, a selection of fresh spreads with pita and crudités, and the flaming saganaki popularized by its predecessor The Parthenon, in which cheese is spectacularly set afire at the table.

“The freshness and simplicity is what calls me the most,” says Chef Saul Ramos of Greek food. Ramos will run the kitchen alongside Greek native Konstantinos Ntalianis.

But Ithaki is the first of these slick, modern joints to open on Halsted in Greektown, where stalwarts like Greek Islands and Athenian Candle Co. provide glimpses of an earlier heyday – one that Demos remembers well from working at his uncle’s restaurant.

“If you were Greek and you wanted to go out, usually you were going [to Greektown],” he says. And non-Greeks joined in, too: Costa’s hosted Barack Obama, Vince Vaughn, and other notable names in its time.

There’s still life to be found at places like Nine Muses and Athena, but much of Greektown has been taken up by new residential buildings and chain businesses in the past decade or more; a luxury high-rise now stands where Costa’s once did. The growth of the neighboring West Loop drove property values up, making it difficult for longtime business or building owners to refuse offers to sell. 

But Chicago’s Greek community – one of the largest in the country – hasn’t gone away, even as its central meeting point has lost some of its pull. “It’s just been a sad downturn in terms of Greek-owned businesses and Greek people coming out,” says Demos. But, “I think they want Greektown to come back. The community I’m involved in really is excited that something new is finally coming.”

He has always wanted to open a Greek restaurant, he says; it’s in his blood. In addition to his uncle, his dad was also a restaurateur, operating diners and other non-Greek restaurants around the city, like many other Greek entrepreneurs. (The diners White Palace Grill and Lou Mitchell’s were both opened by Greeks, as were grocery stores like Treasure Island, Pete’s Fresh Market, and Cermak Fresh Market.) “I’d be five years old running around the kitchen,” Demos recalls. His dad “made me touch every job in the restaurant – bartender, server, food runner – to help me understand the business from every angle.”

After Costa’s closed, Demos eventually returned to the restaurant business with the Italian Sapori Trattoria and casual steakhouse Butcher and the Bear, both also on Halsted, but several miles north in Lincoln Park. (Like Butcher and the Bear, Ithaki will also offer steak.) His Forte Hospitality Group is also working on a sort of little sister restaurant to Ithaki in Elmwood Park. Called Ethos Taverna, it will offer some similar menu items while also featuring a takeout window and a menu of wraps and sandwiches including their take on gyros, with pork belly instead of lamb.

“If you get a gyro in Greece, you’re going to get pork, you’re going to get chicken,” Demos says. He and his partners are aiming to open Ethos in the first half of 2026.

Ithaki’s beverage program spotlights Greek producers, with cocktails featuring such rare-in-the-U.S. spirits as the resin-derived mastiha or kumquat liqueur, and a wine list that’s majority Greek. “I think Greek wines are criminally underrated,” Demos says. If “people [are] exposed to it, I think they’ll fall in love.”