What do you actually get when you walk into a Greek restaurant in the middle of West Texas? That’s not a rhetorical question. If you’ve never been to Greece Is the Word on 50th Street, it’s a fair thing to wonder before you pull open the door.
What you get, mostly, is Nikos Papadakis — or at least his cooking. Nikos opened the place in 2017 after two decades bouncing between restaurant kitchens in Dallas and a brief stint back in Thessaloniki visiting family. He’s a compact, unhurried man who tends to come out of the kitchen mid-service to refill water glasses or explain something on the menu that a table is puzzling over. He doesn’t do it for show. He just seems genuinely bothered by the idea of someone ordering the wrong thing.
The restaurant is small — maybe fourteen tables — in a low-slung strip center off 50th near Indiana. The room is plain: white walls, a few framed photographs of the Greek coast, the kind of tabletop candles that come in small glass jars. Nothing about the space announces itself. The food does the work instead.
The spanakopita is worth the trip alone. Nikos makes the phyllo himself, which almost nobody does, and the layers shatter when you press a fork through them. The filling is spinach and feta without filler or apology. It runs about eight dollars for a generous portion. Order it even if you think you don’t like spanakopita; the version you’ve had before probably wasn’t this.
The lamb souvlaki is the other thing regulars tend to point to. It comes on skewers over a pile of lemon rice, with a side of tzatziki that’s thick enough to hold its shape on a fork. The lamb is sourced from a supplier outside Amarillo, and Nikos is particular about the cut — always shoulder, never leg, because he thinks leg gets stringy when it sits. He’ll tell you this if you ask. He’ll probably tell you anyway.
Lunch is quieter and runs Monday through Friday. Dinner Thursday through Saturday is when the place fills up, and by seven o’clock on a Friday you may wait twenty minutes for a table. There’s no reservation system, which is a mild inconvenience and also somehow fitting. Greece Is the Word is the kind of restaurant that operates on its own terms.
Dinner for two with an appetizer and a glass of Greek wine — the list is short but chosen carefully — lands around fifty to sixty dollars. It’s not cheap for Lubbock, but it’s not trying to be cheap. It’s trying to be good, which it consistently is.
Nikos has talked, in an offhand way, about opening a second location. He doesn’t sound convinced it’s a good idea, and honestly, neither does the restaurant itself. Some places work because of their scale. This is one of them. Go before the word gets much further out.
