Everyone loves Sherwood Diner.
For 49 years, 901 Post Road East has been the melting pot of Westport. High school teams descend en masse after games, leaving hundreds of dirty plates in their wake. Young families manipulate toddlers into high chairs and stow infants in car seats on the windowsills. Festooned patrons of the now-shuttered Cedar Brook Café heel-teetered to the diner for sustenance after late-night revelries.
Hungry truck drivers, sweaty fitness instructors. There’s hardly a type the diner doesn’t attract.
Like many diners, Sherwood was built offsite and trucked to its location in 1977 (diner “experts” prefer these prefab units). Now, like many diners, Sherwood is seeing a generational shift in management. In 2020, a month before Covid, Vasili Tziolis Staples ’12, became general manager. The son of co-owner Zenny, Vasili spent his pandemic downtime sprucing up the digs with his father and his father’s partner Dmitri Alatakis.
Zenny and his wife emigrated to America when opportunities were scarce for Greek immigrants. However, the diner business was booming. Why? An influx of earlier Greek immigrants had found work in restaurants and, after years of saving their money, started eateries of their own.
An NYT article states, "about two-thirds of New York City's diners are Greek-owned.” This proliferation of Greek diners created industry, information, and opportunity for their community.
It also created enormous menus. With fast food booming since the ‘50s - McDonald’s, Howard Johnson - the diner industry instructed owners to fight back with more and more comfort food. Zenny’s new business saw the hey-day of these manifold menus, packed with quintessential American and Greek dishes.
“It was fear of missing out,” explains Vasili. “There was a perceived disadvantage if you didn't have something someone else carries.” He points out that most menu items were variations on a theme, “taking an item and replicating it 20 different ways.”
Like the menus, the decor was more and more and more: pie cases, ornate light fixtures, Acropolis-inspired columns, even large fish tanks. Now, Sherwood hardly bedecked to this degree, but it’s impossible to not notice the streamlined changes.
To get a “clean, modern vibe,” they got rid of the large light fixtures to open up the ceiling and trimmed the columns. They added tiles to the seating counter and removed the pie case and milk and coffee machines.
For the menu, they decided to focus on fresh fare made really well. Which meant nixing the frozen items, tossing out mixes, and ditching dishes like chicken marsala and stir fry which “created complexity that we don’t specialize in.” Oh, and getting rid of liver and onions due to its limited appeal.
Now they focus on “omelettes, pancakes, clubs, and salads.” The most popular items? Scrambled eggs, grilled cheese, and burgers.
A word about the burgers: diners have always raved about them and it, too, has enjoyed a renaissance. It’s 8 ounces, large for a diner, and what Vasili describes as a “value sandwich.” They upgraded the bun and created a “house seasoning” which Vasili describes as “salt, pepper, garlic salt, onion… you know, simple seasonings -” I interrupt, “Did you come up with this?” He modestly smiles and admits, “Yeah… I do the R&D.”
His research has yielded house-made buttermilk pancakes with real buttermilk, chicken cutlets breaded to order and, my favorite, a “Pancake Flight” which showcases three of their most popular flapjacks.
He’s currently developing a line of fresh-squeezed mimosas, to showcase their new full bar.
The result is a diner poised for the next 40 years, dishing up great meals as always. And you can enjoy it all with a cocktail.