The menu offered the usual: egg salad sandwiches, hot dogs, burgers, and fries. But a word at the bottom caught my eye: Greek omelet, Greek salad.
"It comes with my grandmother's oil and vinegar dressing," said David Lines, a dark-haired fellow in his 20s.
So the place was Greek. I would never have guessed, though I soon learned that the Oasis was one of many restaurants around Burlington that suppress their Greekness behind a mask of Americana. I wondered why. On a bleak winter day, nothing seemed more appealing than a whiff of the Greek Isles, a land synonymous with sun, sand, and vacation.
Lines and his brother Jon started running the Oasis in 1997, when their father, Stratton Lines -- the third man in the photo -- retired. Stratton's parents emigrated from Sparta via Ellis Island. When this Mountain View diner car migrated to Burlington in 1953 from its New Jersey factory, a legacy was in the making. David and Jon are the third generation to run the Burlington landmark; eventually, it seems, everyone passes through.
So why the stinginess with Greek food? David says they occasionally whip up a batch of spanakopita, that savory spinach and feta pie wrapped in paper-thin phyllo dough, but why ditch a menu that has worked for 50 years?
"This is what we've always known," he said, "so this is what we do."
The Parkway Diner in South Burlington is less timid. When I got there, owner George Alvanos was greeting customers in his thick Greek accent. Potent Greek symbols were visible in every corner of this otherwise typically American lunch joint: drachmas on a plaque, the blue and white national flag, and pictures of harbors and fishing boats.
An Athens native, Alvanos has been in Vermont since 1980. In 1997 he bought this vintage Worcester diner. He serves the usual fare, but plenty of Greek food, too: homemade spanakopita, moussaka, pastitsio, bean soup, and lemon chicken baked with garlic. His wife, Christine, works here, he told me, and the head chef is his son, Evan.
"Evan?"
