Dr. Who? What is a tardis? I never really watched Dr. Who but I’ve seen these phone booths. I’m told that when you enter the phone booth, you find yourself no longer in a phone booth but in a whole ‘nother place.
As a kid, I read “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis, a gripping youth series that describes children who find a portal to another world in the back of a wardrobe. Where time doesn’t follow the same parallels as the real world and all the animals are magic and talk and they have delicious treats like Turkish Delight (which in real life is surprisingly NOT delicious) and they get treated like royalty.
Yeero-Yeero is exactly like both of these things — other than the things that I don’t know about Dr. Who (which is virtually everything I haven’t listed) and a talking lion and ice witch trying to kill you from the books.
Who knew Yeero-Yeero, the blue and white building with the double drive-through windows on Youree near Southfield had a “dine in” option? Apparently me, but I had written the whole thing off as some kind of fantasy or distant memory that was somehow melded into a book series or tv show I read or watched 30 years ago that involve small spaces diverting into other worlds.
In another life (another real part of my life, not an imaginary or made up one) I was married. I have a faint memory of coming to visit my parents and going to Yeero-Yeero and going inside but instead of the picnic tables and checkered blue and white booths I expected from most Greek restaurants, we were transported into this grand ballroom filled with ornate statues, giant paintings, muraled ceilings and everything they could find from a 1993 Home Interiors catalog that was gilded in gold.
But circle back to today, I’m not kidding, just walking into this place is like walking into a Greek Orthodox Church in a busy city. Outside is chaotic and noisy and inside is a grandiose sanctuary devoted to one of my favorite types of cuisine on the planet (in my opinion and the opinion of anyone reading a book on “the Mediterranean diet”… also me).
I’ve driven through the drive through at this place before. I’ve ordered the only thing I thought would be halfway portable and designed to eat without causing a pile-up on Youree motor speedway. I have always gotten the chicken gyro (don’t ask me if it’s pronounced Jai-ROW or Yee-Row; I’m not an Aphrodite) because a “gyro gyro” can be so hit or miss. Sometimes it’s too dry, sometimes it tastes like Steak-ums from the freezer section at Aldi and sometimes they taste like an old Arby’s roast beef sandwich (I eat my crinkle fries first, don’t judge).
But since I was no longer in the drive-through, I was no longer in Shreveport. Honestly, after walking in today, felt like I was no longer in any world on this planet but transported into a dream in Athens… I decided to ask my prompt to a polite, bearded king server whose name I don’t know but let’s call him Aslan.
“Which gyro is best?” He said, “Definitely the all greek gyro gyro (yeero-yeero)” so I said I’d have that.
Like all things that happen in a time-warp where you’d even have to go outside the small (yet seemingly spacious) building to get from the dining room to the kitchen, my meal arrived at my table almost before I was finished ordering it. The soft but sturdy pita was filled with over 1/4lb of gyro meat, lettuce, onions and tomatoes and topped with a zesty creamy tzatziki sauce.
Beside it were French fries. Or at least that’s what this magical talking lion server was trying to tell me were French fries… but these ain’t no fries I ever heard of. They were browned and seasoned as if they’d be Cajun fries but they aren’t. They’re just roughed up on the exterior from likely a baking soda bath and boil which created a Grecian delightful interior that was soft, warm and pillowy followed by a crispy exterior drizzled with what I assume to be olive oil and magical herbs that turned these taters from French fries into delicious carb nuggets that I was perfectly fine with ditching day one of my diet for.
I asked for an extra side of tzatziki to dip them in. I wanted to envision myself as being able to somehow exit this magical world and then be super-small compared to these “French fries and tzatziki ” and then swim in them like Scrooge McDuck.
But alas, when I paid my bill after making a brief stop to the restroom (video on my Facebook at “Ami Eats Everything”) I went back outside to the same world I had known before, somehow feeling like a perfectly normal-sized queen, who had now met a lion, eaten a delicious amount of Grecian Delight, seen no witch, and made no phone calls from inside the wardrobe/tardis from which I emerged.
Go to Yeero-Yeero. At lunch or dinner. Take a date. Go inside. Sit down and you can leave like royalty too.
