Where to Eat in Greektown, Detroit
A neighborhood with real history, a stadium crowd problem, and a few places worth finding between the games.
Greektown occupies a few blocks of Monroe Street between Beaubien and St. Antoine, plus the cross streets that feed into it. On a Tigers game night, or a Lions weekend, or a concert evening at Ford Field, the sidewalks fill with people looking for somewhere to eat before the event and somewhere to drink after it. The restaurants have adapted to that crowd. Menus are large, portions are large, turnover is fast. The neighborhood knows what it is.
What Greektown also is, underneath the stadium-night energy, is one of the oldest continuously operating dining districts in Detroit. Greek immigrants began opening restaurants here in the late 1800s.1Greek immigrants established restaurants and businesses on Monroe Street in the late 1800s, according to local historical accounts and the Greektown Preservation Society. The neighborhood survived highway construction, casino development, and decades of downtown disinvestment. Monroe Street is still standing because the restaurants on it kept drawing people when very little else did. That history is real, even when the dining experience on a Friday night feels more like a theme park than a neighborhood.
I come to Detroit often enough that I have opinions about where to eat in most of the city's food neighborhoods. Greektown is the one I have the fewest strong opinions about, because I spend most of my Detroit meals in Corktown or Midtown. But I have eaten here, and here is what I have found worth eating.
Pegasus Taverna
500 Monroe St. If you are going to eat Greek food in Greektown, Pegasus is reportedly the one the locals return to. The restaurant has operated on Monroe Street for decades, and the saganaki (flaming cheese, the dish Greektown is famous for popularizing) is the signature.2Saganaki (flaming cheese) is widely credited as having been popularized in American dining by Greektown Detroit restaurants, though the specific origin is disputed among several establishments. "Opa!" and a burst of flame at the table. Tourists love it. The cheese underneath the theater is good: kefalograviera brined and pan-fried until the outside is crisp and the center is molten.
Beyond the saganaki, the menu runs traditional Greek: lamb chops, moussaka, spanakopita, gyros. The lamb chops (reportedly in the $28-$34 range) are the dish I would order for someone who needed convincing that Greektown can still cook. Grilled hard, seasoned simply, served with lemon and oregano. Not reinventing anything. Executing a tradition with competence. The rooftop patio, when the weather cooperates, offers a view of the neighborhood that makes the whole block feel less like a tourist corridor and more like a place people actually live near.
Astoria Pastry Shop
541 Monroe St. Greektown's bakery counter has been turning out baklava and galaktoboureko for decades. The baklava is what draws the line: layers of phyllo, walnuts, honey syrup, the kind of sweetness that earns its intensity rather than hiding behind it. Galaktoboureko (custard wrapped in phyllo) is the other essential. If you visit on a Saturday, the display case is full. By Sunday afternoon, the best pieces are gone.
Astoria is a stop, not a meal. Grab a box of baklava ($3-$5 per piece, reportedly) and a Greek coffee, and eat it on the sidewalk. It works as a postscript to dinner at Pegasus or as a pre-game sugar hit before walking to Comerica Park. The interior is small, bright, and does not pretend to be a cafe. Order, pay, leave happy.
Golden Fleece
525 Monroe St. Another long-running Greek restaurant on the same block as Pegasus, with a similar menu and a similar crowd. The gyro plate is reportedly solid. The souvlaki skewers, grilled on the char-broiler, are the more interesting order. I have eaten here once, on a Tuesday night when the dining room was half-empty, and the food was competent if not revelatory. The prices are moderate (entrees reportedly in the $16-$26 range), and the portions are sized for the stadium crowd, which means generous.
Golden Fleece and Pegasus compete for the same customer. Locals I have talked to tend to have a preference, and that preference is usually Pegasus. But Golden Fleece fills its own niche: a sit-down Greek meal at a fair price, with enough room that you can usually get a table without a reservation.
Sunda New Asian
33 W Columbia St. The new arrival. Sunda New Asian is a 200-plus-seat pan-Asian restaurant from Chicago restaurateur Billy Dec, opening March 10 in The District development zone near Comerica Park. This is not a Greektown restaurant in the traditional sense. It is a large-format national concept positioned to capture downtown's event-night traffic, and its location puts it at the edge of the neighborhood.
The Chicago original, open since 2009, built its reputation on sashimi pizza, whole roasted duck, and a menu that spans Southeast Asian cuisines. Two hundred seats is a different calculation than the smaller, chef-driven restaurants that have defined Detroit's recent dining growth. We have not visited the Detroit location yet (it opens the day after this guide publishes) and will report back with a full assessment once the kitchen has had time to settle. Expect appetizers in the $18-$29 range and entrees from $34 to $56, based on the Chicago pricing model.
The Honest Assessment
Greektown's problem is not that the food is bad. The food, at the Greek restaurants that have survived here for decades, is mostly fine. Pegasus can cook. Astoria can bake. The problem is that the neighborhood has been shaped by its proximity to two stadiums and a casino, and that proximity has pushed the dining toward volume, toward menus designed to move fast, toward an experience that serves the event crowd more than it serves the food.
If you are coming for a Tigers game and want dinner first, Pegasus is the right call. If you want baklava, Astoria. If you want the best meal within a fifteen-minute drive, go to Corktown or Midtown instead.
That is not a knock on Greektown. Not every neighborhood needs to be a dining destination. Some neighborhoods are dining corridors, designed to feed people before and after they do the thing they actually came for. Greektown does that job well. The saganaki at Pegasus is still fun. The baklava at Astoria is still excellent. Monroe Street is still standing, which, given what downtown Detroit has been through in the past fifty years, is its own kind of achievement.
Getting There
Greektown is directly east of downtown Detroit, walkable from Comerica Park and Ford Field. The Greektown station on the People Mover connects to the rest of downtown. Parking is available in several garages within a block of Monroe Street, and street parking is possible on quieter nights. From Ann Arbor, take I-94 east to M-10 (Lodge Freeway) south, exit at Congress or Larned. Forty-five minutes in normal traffic.
If you are combining Greektown with other Detroit eating, Eastern Market is less than ten minutes east, and Midtown is ten minutes north on Woodward. A Saturday that starts at Eastern Market, moves through Midtown for lunch, and ends in Greektown before a Tigers game is one of the better days of eating you can plan in this city.
Greektown is on Monroe Street between Beaubien and St. Antoine, downtown Detroit. See our Detroit dining guide for restaurants across the city, and our Midtown guide and Corktown guide for the neighborhoods we visit most often.