Every morning before sunrise, the lights come on inside Aquarius Restaurant on Market Street. The smell of coffee fills the air. In the kitchen, dishes clatter while early commuters murmur over their first cups. At 78, John Kontaxis still works the grill himself, while his wife, Maria, moves from table to table greeting customers she’s known for years. For more than four decades, the two have run Aquarius together, just across from the 69th Street Transportation Center.
Open seven days a week, Aquarius is the last Greek-owned restaurant in Upper Darby, a town that once pulsed with Greek life. In the 1970s, more than five thousand Greeks lived here, part of the wave that moved west from Philadelphia’s older Greek neighborhoods. What remains now is one small diner, quietly holding on while generations have come and gone.
John’s story began far from Market Street. In 1971, after seven years aboard Greek merchant ships, he made a decision that changed his life.
“I worked on ships for seven years,” he recalls. “Then I served in the Greek army. When I went back to the ships, the pay wasn’t good anymore, so I decided to stay in the United States.”
He landed in New Orleans, then came to Philadelphia with sixty-two dollars in his pocket and only a few words of English. His first job was at the Continental Inn at Bridge and Pratt, where fate intervened. That’s where he met Maria Tsouris, a high school student from Demati, Ioannina, helping at her father’s restaurant on weekends…