For three decades, octopus at Dmitri’s grabbed Philadelphians by the tentacles

Nothing lasts forever, even restaurants. Especially restaurants. But while they’re open, restaurants can make magic — the family meals, the business deals, the first (and hundredth) dates that create memories that do last forever. “The 86′d Project,” an exclusive Inquirer series, takes a look back at the restaurants that made an impact on the Philadelphia region.

In this installment, we remember Dmitri’s, created by Dmitri Chimes in 1990.

Philadelphia has always been a town of seafood restaurants. It’s also had its Greek restaurants — mainly diners and luncheonettes.

Dmitri Chimes combined the two in a former diner on a Queen Village corner in January 1990. As one of the earlier entrants on Philadelphia’s BYOB scene, Dmitri’s delivered what Rick Nichols, then an Inquirer food columnist, called “clattering, Zorba-esque, cheek-by-jowl conviviality.”

Word spread quickly not only among neighbors but within the culinary community. The octopus in particular — boiled for hours in red wine, dried out, and then grilled over charcoal — grabbed cognoscenti by the tentacles. Eric Boerner, a longtime chef, said it was not a stretch to consider Dmitri’s octopus a signature dish of Philadelphia, “like Georges Perrier’s crab galette, DiLullo Centro’s whole sardines, Little Pete’s Reuben, or Monk’s moules frites. You got a lesson in proper octopus with every counter visit: keep it simple, make it quickly. Char, olive oil, lemon juice, herbs, salt, and pepper. The very essence of Mediterranean food.”

You had to bring cash, and your patience. At the original location, Dmitri’s didn’t take cards, or reservations.

Dmitri Chimes, now 72 and retired, grew up in Philadelphia, the son of painters — Thomas Chimes, regarded at the time of his 2009 death as “the dean of Philadelphia contemporary artists,” and his wife, Dawn, whom he met in art school in New York City. As a young artist, Tom Chimes worked for his parents — Greek immigrants James and Agnes Chimes, who owned luncheonettes and a seafood restaurant in Brewerytown.

When Dmitri Chimes was growing up, he said, he remembered his father’s advice: “ ‘Don’t go in the restaurant business! It’s too hard.’ I guess it didn’t stick.”

Instead, Dmitri was a musician, playing in the house band at the London in Fairmount and doing a little of this and that in the kitchen with the restaurant’s chef, Sara, who lived upstairs. When owner Warren Brown decided to open another London, on 12th Street near Sansom (now Sueño), he agreed to give Dmitri a steady job as a prep cook. He started in 1983.

“I still remember the first day I went in there. It was wintertime. The windows were steamy. They were cooking in the kitchen. Curiously enough, this was around the time that there was a series on PBS, The Great Chefs of New Orleans, and that place had that kind of feel. I thought this was the best thing. The first day, they throw you in this little room on a stainless-steel table and a bag of mussels that you got to pick the beards off of, or 50 pounds of carrots to peel, but before I knew it, I was on the line and I was loving it. It was mayhem and excitement and I really loved my first years as a cook. Then I started moving around, seeing what some of the other restaurants were doing.”

The journeyman cook and chef slid from kitchen to kitchen through the 1980s: The Garden. Two weeks at Arthur’s Steakhouse. Waldo’s. Frog. Carolina’s.

Through his father, he met Tom Vasiliades, the Greek immigrant who owned South Street Souvlaki. “Tom tells me, ‘Meet me Tuesday morning at 7 o’clock on South Street.’ I’m standing outside. A Continental pulls up and Tom says, ‘Get in the car.’ We drive down to the fish market at the distribution center and he starts buying cases of fish, throwing him in the trunk of this Lincoln Continental. I’m thinking, ‘What the hell?’ ”

That’s how Chimes learned about buying and selling fresh fish. In the late 1980s, after he had been at South Street Souvlaki for a while, Chimes asked for a raise. He had a family — his wife, Sheila, was a homemaker and a restaurant worker, and his daughter, Leah (now 36 and a nurse), was a baby. (Son Theo, 32, is a gunsmith.)

Chimes said Vasiliades shot him down: “He said, ‘No. You’re not worth it.’ I said, ‘You know what? I quit.’ ” (The two made up long ago: “He’s a good person and a great friend,” said Vasiliades, who sold the restaurant during the pandemic.)

Sheila Chimes, who likes to stay in the background, helped her husband make the next step. She had waited tables at Jerry’s, a diner at Third and Catharine Streets in Queen Village, just before it closed. She put Dmitri in touch with Robert Strauss, a journalist who also owned Jerry’s with Jerry DeLena.

“He said, ‘Can I take over your lease?’ Strauss said. “And I said something like, ‘My partner and I both had other jobs. How can you support a family in this small place?’ He kept repeating, ‘Can I take over your lease?’ ” Reluctantly, Strauss said, they let Chimes assume it. “I thought he wouldn’t make it, and I was wrong,” Strauss said. “Monumentally wrong.”

Chimes lightly made over Jerry’s — not that there was much to make over in the small corner space — inheriting an antique marble counter and an iron grill that he installed over charcoal for cooking. Chimes said the iron was superior to the stainless steel that everyone else was using and contributed to the food’s char. Chimes picked up the day’s catch not in a Lincoln but in a blue Volvo.

He and Hua Xiong, a line cook he knew from Friday Saturday Sunday, did all the cooking. “It got busy right away,” Chimes said. “The first night, we did 15 dinners. That weekend, we did 60, which is a turnover of two times.”

The all-female waiters, in their Betsey Johnson dresses and high boots, “were treated like rock stars around town,” said Nancy Benussi, who tried out for a month before landing her job in 1990. The pace was frantic, starting with setup at 3 p.m. “Two solid hours, and when the doors opened at 5, we were already on a wait,” she said.

Anyone waiting for a table was shooed over to the bar at New Wave Cafe across the street. When the table was ready, a waitress would head over. “I was always worried they were going to get hit by a car running across the street,” Chimes said. “When we went to cell phones, that solved that problem.”

The Dmitri’s-New Wave relationship “at first was kind of bizarre and then it became the norm,” said Nate Ross, who had opened the New Wave five years before with brothers Sam and Aly Lynagh. ”We started proselytizing their customers into trying us. It forced us to up our game.”

Dmitri’s became the go-to for off-duty restaurant staff on Mondays, because Chimes chose to close on Tuesdays. In the pre-Internet days, neighbors had phone trees to alert them to open tables. The story goes that while Tom Hanks was here to film Philadelphia, his wife, Rita Wilson, called to reserve the restaurant. Chimes turned her down because he didn’t want to disappoint his regulars and because there would be no privacy. Hanks instead dined at Felicia’s, then at 11th and Ellsworth Streets, and his character gave it a shout-out in the movie.

A few years after he opened, Chimes said, the owner of a building at 12th and Locust Streets in Center City approached him about opening a second Dmitri’s. “I thought, ‘Why would I open another Dmitri’s and compete with myself?’ ” he said. (In hindsight, he said, “this is ridiculous because it’s like 20 blocks away.”)

But, he thought, “I had been to Spain in ’83 and you know what? Greek cooking and Spanish cooking is not dissimilar.”

Pamplona, with a Spanish menu, opened in 1994. “That worked really pretty well for a while, but it was 200 seats,” Chimes said. “That was a little bit out of my league.” Chimes also now questions his decision to serve only wines from Portugal and Spain and beers, but not hard liquor. “I was giving up a revenue stream just to be belligerent,” he said. In 2000, Pamplona closed after a brief spell as a Dmitri’s; it’s now Knock.

In 1997, Chimes opened Stix, a Mediterranean vegetarian cafe, at 23rd and Pine Streets, across from Fitler Square. Despite early success, he said, the lighter cooking may have been too ahead of its time. “People weren’t ready to be told to eat like this,” he said. In 1999, he converted it to a Dmitri’s, and it had a solid run before closing in 2014. (Chimes said he faults himself for not buying the building when he could have because he feared having to raise menu prices.) The space is now Cotoletta.

In 2003, he opened the cheekily named Italian Restaurant at 24th and Lombard with South Philly-style Italian cooking. Early reviews were tepid. He quickly changed it to Dmitri’s 24th Street Cafe and broadened the menu to what he said at the time was “all over the place.” It closed within a year and is now Rival Bros.

In 2010, he opened Dmitri’s at Second and Laurel Streets in Northern Liberties. He started making improvements in 2019.

But by then, Chimes said, he was having labor problems. In late 2019, with repairs needed to the Queen Village building, he shuttered the flagship.

He kept going in Northern Liberties. Then 2020 rolled around. “I was ready to close out my days with this place, but then the mayor closed all the restaurants for COVID and I had just taken a whole bunch of my savings to renovate,” he said. “I said, ‘You know what? I guess the writing’s on the wall. I’m 70 years old. This is probably a good time to just let it go.”