March 5, 2020

Day-to-day operations of Nick’s Gyros have been in the hands of the next generation for several years now, but for customers, it’s the same experience and the same gyros and other Greek food.

“I want to do improvements but just kind of keep it like a mom-and-pop shop,” said Kosta Sengos, son of owner Andy Sengos, who started Nick’s in 1982. “I don’t want to get too fancy.”

Customers still order their gyros and hamburgers at the counter of the restaurant at 1512 W. 41st St. and eat in the dining room that’s filled with Andy’s thriving plants.

The 72-year-old owner, who retired six years ago, still drops by in the morning. Kosta makes him breakfast, and Andy makes sure the grounds are looking good. In the wintertime, he’s moving snow and patching potholes in the parking lot. In the summertime, he’s watering and weeding the outdoor flowers and plants. A few years ago, Nick’s received a beautification award from the city.

“I keep nice and beautiful, and 41st especially in this area because of all the traffic and all the people gonna go through here, so it’s nice in the summertime. I love the flowers.”

Kosta also schedules Andy to work the lunch hour every Friday. “I like it to come here. I come to see my customers; I talk to my customers.”

Many of those customers make the wrong assumption and call him Nick. That’s actually the name of Kosta’s godfather, who owns Omaha-area Greek restaurants called King Kong.

In Sioux Falls, other restaurants and food trucks serve gyros, but with its 38-year history, Nick’s is the defining standard.

“There’s nothing bad about it, but they know — it’s like, ‘Ah, it doesn’t taste like Nick’s.’ There’s just something special about what we have here,” Kosta said. The gyro meat is a mixture of 90 percent beef and 10 percent lamb that’s shaved to order from the traditional vertical cone and grilled. Nick’s makes its own tatziki sauce, and Kosta said that’s the key to the popular Greek sandwich, which is served on warm pita bread.

Customers also love the french fries, cheeseburgers and baklava, which Kosta makes himself.

The first location for Nick’s was tucked in one of the hallways in The Empire Mall, but there were a lot of challenges, Andy said, noting that he could have 20 customers, but the large dining room looked empty.

“It’s very hard to come here to South Dakota because of farmers here, everybody (ate) steaks, hamburgers, McDonald’s. Everybody come to the restaurant and look at me so funny and say, ‘What’s this stuff?’”

So he started giving out samples of meat to customers as they walked by. “And they’d say, ‘Oh, it’s good!’ ”

A couple of years later, he moved across Louise Avenue to the New Town Mall – now Empire East – and started to build a following.

Nick’s was there for seven years, but when Taco Bell decided to leave its adobe-style building on 41st Street and put up a new site across the street in the early 1990s, Andy bought the property. He painted the building in the colors of the Greek flag — white with blue trim – and filled the inside with plants.

The menu has been mostly the same for all those years, but Kosta is making a few changes.

“My son now, you know, the new school, going to start new stuff,” Andy joked.

“We’re just trying to cater to the customers,” Kosta said. “People always write online like, ‘Oh, do you have falafel or hummus, this and that?’ So now we have a spicy gyro too that’s pretty popular.” It has hot peppers in addition to the original tomatoes and onions, and he added Sriracha and cayenne to the tzatziki.

He added hummus — but not falafel — and a kids’ menu.

Recent improvements to the building were sparked by tornado damage last year. The restaurant has a new sign out front and a new roof.

While the drive-thru menu board wasn’t damaged, Kosta replaced it with an updated, bright display.

“In the process of that, I decided I might as well do some things on the inside, so I painted,” Kosta said. “My parents go to Greece every year, so I just started getting photos up there,” he said, pointing to the walls of the dining room, which fills up over the lunch hour. There’s one of Andy and his brother on a beach in Greece, which Andy left for the United States when he was 24.

Kosta said he’d love to open another restaurant in town but finding good help is holding him back.

“I tell customers all the time we’d have 20 of these but we can’t find good help. … If you can find me some employees, I’ll be like, ‘Where do I sign?’ I would love it because I’d like to continue what he started, and it’s just such a good product. We’ll just keep doing that here.”