_{In the spring of 2025, the storefront at 115 Ontario Street was boarded over. That summer, Stratford’s downtown BIA covered the boards with a painting by Carlie Pearce depicting Ellam’s restaurant, formerly located there. (KAILYN STEINGARD/SEVEN EIGHT)}

There’s a principle in nature that says empty space will fill with something. Weeds will fill a fallow field, for example, and gas will fill a chamber. So too it is with unknown people. Rumours will fill the void where factual details might otherwise be.

For generations of Stratfordians, Peter Koromilas, the former owner of Ellam’s restaurant, was such an unknown person. Few people knew him well, so they made up stories about him. Some people said he was a mob boss, others that the business was a front for a money-laundering scheme. Over the course of Koromilas’s ownership of the restaurant its patronage waned until, following the death of his wife in 2014, Koromilas was regularly seen sitting inside alone, looking out onto Ontario Street. Photographer Jonathan Sippel captured this period in a series of portraits of Koromilas taken in 2017. If you look closely at the images you can see where the rumours continued to creep in, filling the space where customers had once been. They’re languishing in the empty booths, nestling between the bottles of Coca-Cola, and picking up dust on the countertops.

Koromilas himself died in 2018, but curiosity about his life and business did not die with him. Over the years, multiple community-group Facebook posts have sought information about the restaurant, which closed following Koromilas’s death, as has a Reddit thread. In 2011, a now-defunct food blog called The Chew published a post titled “Dangerous Liasons [sic]: Lunch at Ellam’s.” The post, in which the author describes much of what Stratford residents already knew—a restaurant frozen in time, with limited menu items of questionable quality—continued to receive comments from readers until as recently as 2025. In 2024, Stratford resident Amy Robertson created a podcast titled “Ya but, who is Ellam?,” echoing the questions asked in the online forums of earlier years. Interest in the restaurant peaked again in 2025 when the downtown business improvement association erected artist Carlie Pearce’s painting on the now-boarded-up storefront. It’s not the first time the restaurant has been immortalized: the signage for Old Man and Son, the diner formerly on Wellington Street south of Market Square, mimicked both the font and colour scheme of the original Ellam’s sign.

“We know it’s famous,” says Xanthi Georganas, whose husband, Ioannis (also known as John), has owned the Ellam’s building, 115 Ontario Street, since 2019. (A popular Facebook post that circulated in 2025 erroneously described them as the “new” owners of Ellam’s.) John is Peter’s nephew. His mother was sister to Peter and his brothers, Tom and Costa, who immigrated from Greece to Ontario in the early 1960s. In 2025, John and Xanthi made the same journey, but just for a visit.

I found them during that stay, and they joined me in my office on a warm evening in mid-August of that year. Since Xanthi speaks little English and John none at all, a friend of mine who speaks Greek joined us via Zoom. I had been looking for the couple for months. While property records turn up John’s name readily enough, finding contact information proved more difficult. I asked realtor friends and corresponded with the secretary of Koromilas’s former lawyer. I spoke with a different lawyer who had dealt with Koromilas’s will and estate. I reached out to City Hall. Finally, after the head of Stratford’s downtown BIA connected us, I spent weeks calling and texting, both in English and in Greek. Eventually, they answered. I wanted to talk to them because I, like everyone else in Stratford, had spent years wondering, “What’s going on with Ellam’s?”

_{Peter Koromilas stands behind the counter in Ellam’s restaurant. Peter and his brother, Tom, bought the business in 1968. (COURTESY XANTHI GEORGANAS)}

Ellam’s was named for Alec and Katherine Ellam, who opened the restaurant in 1951. In 1964, they sold it to Lorne and Pat Bolton. Lorne worked across the street at The Beacon Herald, where Mercer Hall now sits. The Ellams convinced Lorne that, given the proximity of his regular work, owning the restaurant would be an easy investment. The rent was $185 a month.

During the Boltons’ four-year tenure as owners of Ellam’s, the restaurant was a bustling place. As it had been when they purchased it, Ellam’s was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week—at the time, it was the only Stratford restaurant with this schedule. During the day, staff served locals and theatregoers; during the night, they served truckers and reporters working late. Occasionally Christopher Plummer would drop by, who, during the 1967 Festival season, played Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. (This particular stint of Plummer’s came just two years after the release of The Sound of Music, which by 1966 was the highest-grossing film in history.)

The most popular item on the menu was the steerburger, sold with tomato, lettuce, and mayonnaise for 65 cents. A wide variety of other menu items included standard diner fare such as bacon, two eggs and toast (80 cents), as well as options not typically seen on menus today like buttermilk (15 cents) or a cheese and onion sandwich (35 cents).Pearl Scott, who worked the night shift, made hamburger patties, coleslaw, and pies by hand while most of Stratford slept. Each morning a bowl of freshly chopped fruit greeted the restaurant’s early-morning patrons.

Following the death of the restaurant’s manager, the Boltons decided to sell the business. They advertised it for sale and waited. Eventually, Peter Koromilas and his brother, Tom, “just appeared out of the blue,” says Lorne.

After immigrating from Greece, the brothers (including Costa) had originally chosen to settle in London, Ontario. When the opportunity to buy Ellam’s presented itself, Peter and Tom took it. The Boltons sold the restaurant to them in 1968 for $24,000. “We sold it as a thriving business,” says Pat.

_{Sophia Koromilas poses inside Ellam’s. Sophia operated the restaurant alongside her husband, Peter. (COURTESY XANTHI GEORGANAS)}

The Boltons describe Peter and Sophia, his wife, as kind, hardworking people. They operated the restaurant on a day-to-day basis while Tom worked in the background. Following the sale of the restaurant, when Lorne would stop by to say hello, Peter and Sophia would insist he have cake and coffee on the house, much to Lorne’s embarrassment. They built a friendship through gestures such as these since, as Lorne puts it, “I don’t think [Sophia] could speak English. And Peter’s English was terrible.” The friendship lasted until the day Peter died—a moment Lorne was present for, sitting by his bedside at Stratford General Hospital.

Peter and Sophia’s work ethic and frugality showed in their ability to eventually buy the building that housed the restaurant, something the Boltons hadn’t been in a position to do. Over time, however, their thriftiness contributed to the restaurant’s decline. They lived upstairs and, while they originally employed a waitress, eventually they did everything themselves. Many Stratfordians have a story from this period, usually along the lines of attempting to order something from the menu only to be told that the item wasn’t in stock, or in the case of a friend of mine, that it wasn’t worth opening a can of tuna for a single tuna salad order. A 2012 Yelp review of the restaurant alleges far worse, including “sticky and coke syrup-stained straws from repeated re-use.”

Pat says there were other factors that contributed to the decline of the business. “He wasn’t a very good cook to start with,” she says of Peter, and there was increasing competition in town. “In order to get the crowd, you had to be top of the line.”

The Boltons also note that Peter “did some things that weren’t quite legal,” some of which people knew about, like selling cigarettes to minors or as individual darts, some of which is only speculation. But in terms of the more grandiose rumours—that Peter was a mob boss or that the restaurant was a cover for a drug operation—the Boltons dismiss these as fanciful fabrications.

When Sophia died, Peter became depressed and disoriented, according to John and Xanthi. Not so disoriented, however, that he couldn’t articulate his wish to leave everything he had to Tom. He expressed this wish to Peter Mantas, the Toronto-based, Greek-speaking lawyer staff at Stratford General Hospital called in 2018 when they realized Peter Koromilas, now on his deathbed, didn’t have a will. Mantas also agreed to be the executor of Peter’s estate. During our phone conversation he described 115 Ontario Street, which he toured, as derelict, and Peter as stubborn—a trait he claimed is typical of Greek men of a certain generation. Tom (likely also stubborn) was adamant that 115 Ontario Street stay in the family; he gave the property to John in 2019 before passing away in 2022.

John and his wife are from the Peloponnese in Greece, a mountainous region making up the southern end of the country. Both are government employees; Xanthi, ironically, does food inspections. Despite the impracticality of maintaining a property in a foreign country, John and Xanthi continue to do so out of respect for Peter and Tom’s wish that the building remain family-owned. A combination of the pandemic and elderly relatives made it difficult to leave Greece immediately following their inheritance, but in 2024 they began the renovation process. In 2025, when I met them, they were here to continue where they had left off.

_{John Georganas stands outside 115 Ontario Street on August 14, 2025. Georganas has owned the building and former location of Ellam’s restaurant since 2019. (KAILYN STEINGARD/SEVEN EIGHT)}

Given how mundane the truth about Ellam’s and the Koromilas family is, why then does our fascination with the restaurant continue? Part of it is the mystery, spurred on by two people who struggled to communicate their story in English, then by an empty storefront and now a boarded-up one. Part of it is nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time when restaurants were open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and Hollywood stars thought it a noble pursuit to take a role in a small-town Shakespearean festival—hell, when Hollywood stars were capable of playing a Shakespearean role at all. But we’re also fascinated with the story of Ellam’s because we live in a time when Peter’s version of frugality, stubbornness, and will to survive is so foreign that when we witness it we assume something nefarious.

Though I fall into the group of Stratfordians who didn’t know Peter well, sitting across from John I feel as though I can see some of his uncle in him. During our conversation, John and Xanthi admitted they don’t know yet what type of business the building will house next. It could become another restaurant, they mused, but they were waiting on building permits before embarking on a full renovation, a process made slower by the state of the building, their inability to speak English, and, of course, their distance from the job. Given all these complications, I asked the obvious: why not simply sell?

When I put the question to them I knew the answer from John’s face and tone, though I didn’t understand a word he was saying: It’s not for sale. The building will stay in the family as was his uncle’s wish. Resoluteness, apparently, runs in the family.