Mediterranean Cuisine

Gyros held to the line

The gyro is the fixed gesture here, cut for the plate or tucked into bread. Joey Campanaro, Chef at Mediterranean Cuisine in Brentwood, works inside a restaurant whose identity rests on Greek and Lebanese cooking rather than a broad, blurred Mediterranean label. The house has been open since 2001, long enough for its core dishes to become the point of return: gyros, platters, salads, and Mediterranean desserts, served in a casual room without turning the cooking into ceremony.

Campanaro’s own path gives that setting a useful frame. He trained at Penn State University, then built a career around Mediterranean cooking, repetition, ownership, and dishes that keep their place because service proves them. Since 2006, his best-known fixed post has been Little Owl in New York City, where he is chef and owner; the continuity matters because it shows how he thinks about a menu item that survives more than one address. His Summer Seafood Boil dates to 2001 in his own account, and his Brussels sprout home fries sit beside it as a marker of how an ordinary ingredient can become a house signature through handling, timing, and return visits.

Greek and Lebanese on the same pass

Mediterranean Cuisine works from a traditional approach, with Greek and Lebanese food sharing the same program. That pairing gives the kitchen its discipline. A gyro asks for heat, slicing, bread, sauce, and pace; a platter asks for proportion, contrast, and enough restraint that the components stay legible. Salads do a quieter kind of work, holding the meal to acid, herbs, and crunch. Desserts close the line without shifting the restaurant into another register.

The menu’s structure is a la carte, but the craft is not in novelty. It is in keeping recognizable preparations steady across service. The lamb and beef gyro stands as one of the restaurant’s known signatures, described plainly as a satisfying sandwich, and that plainness is useful. It tells you where the kitchen has put its trust: into meat cut for immediate eating, into bread that carries rather than distracts, into the plate or platter as the everyday unit of hospitality.

The counter keeps its own rhythm

The room is casual, which in a restaurant like this usually means the bench has to carry more of the weight. There is no grand table-side theatre to hide behind. The counter, the pass, and the containers of prepared components have to meet the same test each time a gyro, salad, platter, or dessert leaves the kitchen. Service depends on sequence: warm meat, cool garnish, bread held correctly, sauce added with enough judgment to season without softening the whole thing too soon.

That is the texture of the place while the work happens. Greek and Lebanese cooking sit close together, not as a concept, but as a daily station of cuts, folds, portions, and plates. If the restaurant’s long run has a lesson, it is this one: the hand stays visible in the repeat order. At Mediterranean Cuisine, the gyro is still the bench.