Greek restaurants in New Hampshire

The dining room at Chelby’s is ready to welcome guests as soon as the doors open.

“It’s never too early for tsipouro,” says Loukas Pozios, the owner and chef at Chelby’s Food and Drink in Manchester.

It’s 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, and while the lamb shanks braise on the grill, in preparation for tomorrow’s “Greek Thursday,” a weekly special menu at Chelby’s, Pozios disappears into a dry walk-in and returns holding a glass bottle with a handwritten label.

The liquor was made from the grapes grown by Pozios’ friends in the small village of Koubourniana in central Greece, where Pozios grew up, and it was shipped to America from Greece. Pozios pours a finger’s width of the alcohol into two small glasses and hands one to me. “One tsipouro and everything is good,” he says.

I take the glass and raise it. Who am I to question Greek culture?

“Yamas,” Pozios says and clinks my glass.

Loukas Pozios is chef and co-owner of Chelby’s Food and Drink in Manchester. (Photo by Stacy Harrison, Manchester Ink Link, via GSNC)

Pozios then returns to his preparation for “Greek Thursday,” an addition to Chelby’s daily fare that includes pizzas, burgers, sandwiches and other standard American favorites. He finishes braising the 30 lamb shanks and places them in hotel pans, where they’ll cook for six hours after being topped with his homemade au jus and tomato sauce.

He then prepares a green bean recipe that he learned from his grandmother in Greece, and when he’s finished with vegetables, he goes to work on the pastitsio. Tomorrow morning, Pozios tells me, he’ll make the spanikopita and the chicken lemon soup — more family recipes.

For Pozios, every Thursday offers an opportunity for him to bring some of the authentic foods and flavors from his home country to his American patrons.

“We started ‘Greek Thursdays’ to give the community, who embraced us when we came here a part of Greece, a part of our heritage and a part of our culture,” Pozios says.

Pozios adds that the dining table in Greece is a sacred place where they celebrate with family and friends, commune with neighbors and resolve differences.

“It is where everything happens,” he says.

In 2019, Pozios, his wife and co-owner, Effie Pozios, and their two children left their home in the Karditsa region of Greece and moved to New Hampshire with the goal of opening a restaurant and pursuing the American Dream in Manchester.

“When I was a child, I longed to come to America,” said Pozios, who started working in his family’s restaurant when he was 8 years old and later completed his degree in the culinary arts in Greece. “It was my dream to come to America and open restaurants.”

In Karditsa, both Loukas and Effie worked at Keramario, a restaurant owned by Effie’s parents, where they honed many of the dining design and restaurant management skills they would bring to the United States.

The Pozios purchased Chelby’s Food and Drinks in 2023 from the former owners and fellow countrymen, siblings Heidi and John Liolios. The Pozios now run their restaurant in accordance with the values of a Greek cultural code called “philoxenia,” which translates to “a friend to the stranger.”

“When a stranger walks into your house, you want them to feel like they’re welcome,” said Effie Pozios. “You want your guests to be well-fed, and you want to hear their stories. It is a big part of the hospitality that was taught to us by our parents and our grandparents.”

Chelby’s is one of numerous restaurants in New Hampshire owned and run by Greek families and serving authentic Greek food.

In fact, the Greek community has had a profound impact on the Granite State, which is home to nearly a dozen Greek Orthodox churches that sponsor myriad Greek festivals throughout the year.

Front and center in many of these cultural festivals sits the “authentic” Greek food and cultural experience.

From gyros to lamb shanks to souvlaki, from spanakopita to pastitsio to moussaka, the New Hampshire palate has a seemingly insatiable taste for Greek cuisine, and there is no shortage of Greek-owned restaurants ready to dish it out.

Loukas and Effie Pozios moved to New Hampshire with a dream of opening their own restaurant. It’s now a reality.

One of the most iconic Greek-owned restaurants in New Hampshire is The Puritan Backroom in Manchester. Originally a confectionery company started in 1917 by the Pappas family, selling ice cream and candy, The Backroom restaurant opened in 1974 and featured Greek-influenced cuisine.

Now run by the fourth generation of Pappas family members — including U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas — the Puritan Backroom is widely known for its claim to have invented the chicken tender, as well as their signature mudslides. Still, more than a half-century later, it still prominently features some Greek items on its menu, paying homage to the family’s culture and ancestry.

In 2010, Greek culture and cuisine also inspired restaurant owner Peter Tsoupelis, whose father immigrated from Xanthi in Northern Greece, to open Amphora in Derry, where he honors both old and new Greek culture.

Similarly, Tsoupelis boasts a familial lineage in Greek cuisine. His father ran a successful restaurant in Utica, New York, called Symeon’s, and his mother provided many of the original recipes that appear on the menu, such as Thracian chicken and Psari-Sto-Filo —the latter’s recipe was sought-after by the magazine Bon Appetit, but his mother never revealed it.

“I didn’t want to open a Greek restaurant. I wanted to open a restaurant where you could dine in Greece,” Tsoupelis said. “All of my mentors and inspirations were Greek chefs.”

While the word “authentic” is bandied around quite a bit in the restaurant industry, sometimes to the point of attrition, it certainly begs further definition.

What exactly makes Greek food — or any cultural cuisine, for that matter — “authentic” to its origins, and not merely some Americanized knock-off? This is not some rhetorical navel-gazing question; it is a genuine concern here.

“One of the things that makes the food authentic is using the family recipes,” Tsoupelis said. “But we also use good, high-quality ingredients imported fresh from Greece. A lot of places pull the food straight from the freezer. We’re a 99% scratch-kitchen, and that’s the difference.”

For Pozios, it is about more than the recipes, although he also imports ingredients from his native country when possible.

“It is about staying true to the cultural values, traditions and techniques,” he said. “It is about the love you put into the food. From village to village, the same dish might be a little different, but it is still authentic if you stay true to those values.”

At Chelby’s, it is another slamming “Greek Thursday” with lamb shanks and the pastitsio I watched prepared flying out on plates from the kitchen. As customers enjoy their meals, I think I might be starting to understand this whole philoxenia thing.

From the kitchen, Loukas Pozios pokes out his head, winks to me and says, “Everything is good. Yamas.”