From a Three-Hour Lunch in Greece to Three Restaurants in the South: The Glory Bound Story

Every restaurant has an origin story. Most of them are written backward, after the fact, to make a business plan sound like destiny.

Ours is genuinely not that. Ours starts with two guys who worked in restaurants, went backpacking around the Greek islands, ate lunch for three hours, drank some Fix and a little Ouzo, and started talking. That is the whole inciting incident. There was no market research. There was a very long lunch.

Chapter One: The Lunch

Will Taylor and Chris McDonald were restaurant buddies island hopping across the Mediterranean when the idea arrived. What got them was not a single dish. It was the pace.

If you have never eaten in Greece, the thing that disorients an American — especially an American who works in restaurants, where the entire business model is table turns — is that a meal is not a transaction with a beginning and an end. It is where the afternoon goes. Plates keep arriving. Nobody brings the check. Nobody hovers. The laid-back atmosphere and the food were inseparable, because the food was built for that pace: things meant to be shared, torn, dipped, and picked at across hours.

Sitting in a local eatery in Poros, somewhere in the third hour of lunch, they started kicking around what it would take to bring that home. Not to copy a Greek taverna. To bring back the feeling — food worth lingering over, in a room nobody wants to leave.

That is the part people miss about Glory Bound. Everyone assumes we started with the gyro. We started with a three-hour lunch.

Chapter Two: December 4, 2009, Hattiesburg

Then you have to actually go home and open a restaurant. In Mississippi.

Here is the thing about being from South Mississippi. It is one of the most confident food cultures in America. Nobody along the Gulf Coast is waiting to be told what tastes good. The seafood is right there, the Cajun and Creole influence is right there, the barbecue and the fried and the comeback sauce are all long since settled. Bringing Greek food into that environment and expecting a warm welcome was, on paper, a strange bet.

So they did the only thing that made sense: they stopped trying to be a Greek restaurant.

We decided to stick to what we knew best and add a Southern twist on the Greek cuisine we had grown to love during our travels.

That single sentence is the actual founding document. Not Greek food in Mississippi — a genuine hybrid, made by people who were fluent in both. The room followed the same logic: pictures and replicated signs from the islands they had traveled, blended with funky wall art that represented their personalities. A little Aegean, a little Gulf Coast, no attempt to pretend to be somewhere else.

On December 4, 2009, Glory Bound opened in Hattiesburg and started serving "Southern Gyros" to friends and family.

In that first year, they sold over 68,000 gyros.

Sixty-eight thousand. In year one. Out of one restaurant. That is not a soft launch that gradually found its audience — that is a town deciding almost immediately that this made sense. As the founders put it, apparently adding a Southern twist to Greek standards was not so crazy after all.

The Dish That Explains Everything

If you want to understand Glory Bound in one item, it is the Pepperjack Gyro.

Take the traditional gyro — beef and lamb off a vertical rotisserie, sliced thin, wrapped in pita. That part is honest to the original. The name itself comes from the Greek gýros, meaning "turn" or "circle," describing the rotating spit; the technique of stacking meat on a vertical spit and shaving it as it cooks developed in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire and came to Greece with Greek refugees from Asia Minor after the 1922–23 population exchange, becoming popular street food in Athens, Chicago, and New York by 1970.

Now add sharp pepperjack and crispy bacon.

A purist would call that heresy. What actually happened is that in 2018, Restaurant Hospitality named the Pepperjack Gyro the "Best Gyro in America" in its Best Sandwiches in America program, and Mashed later placed it at the very top of its national roundup of the absolute best gyros in the United States, describing it as a concoction of culinary daring and "a crafty spin on a Greek classic, one that's drawn customers from around the country to sing its praises."

A gyro with bacon on it, out of Mississippi, beat the country. There is no better summary of the whole enterprise.

And it was not a stroke of genius. It came out of the same trial-and-error grind that produced our eight hummus flavors and, along the way, some flavors that never should have existed. Will has made his share of hummus that was a no-go. The Pepperjack Gyro, the cheese rolls, and the craft hummus lineup all came out of continuous tinkering — which is to say the award-winning sandwich and the failed experiments came from exactly the same habit.

Chapter Three: Three Rooms

Hattiesburg came first, out on US Highway 49 in Midtown. Tuscaloosa followed, crossing a state line into Alabama, where it settled on the Strip at 1301 University Boulevard and became a fixture of University of Alabama life — known locally as the home of the pepperjack gyro. Ocean Springs came after that, at 1107 Government Street in the heart of downtown.

What has stayed constant across all three is the part that came from that lunch in Poros. Live entertainment outside every week, Tuesday through Sunday. A large covered patio built for eating, playing, and relaxing. Brunch every Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. A menu deep enough — eight hummus flavors, sixteen gyros, hand-tossed pizzas, plates, salads, baklava with Lady May honey — that a table can order for two hours and not repeat itself.

That is not an accident of menu planning. That is a restaurant designed to make a three-hour lunch possible in the American South.

Seventeen Years of Memories That Belong to Other People

Here is what nobody warns you about when you open a restaurant: after a while, it stops being yours.

Seventeen years in three college and coastal towns means our dining rooms have hosted an enormous amount of other people's lives. First dates that worked and first dates that did not. Game days. Post-graduation lunches with the whole family in from out of town. The table where somebody's kid finally tried hummus. Weeknight dinners so ordinary that nobody remembers them individually, which is exactly what makes a place part of a town rather than a destination.

Some of those memories are on our walls — the island photos, the replicated signs, the funky art that has accumulated since 2009. Most of them we never hear about. That trade is the best part of the job.

It has also taken us further than three dining rooms. In 2017 the team made hummus from scratch in Guatemala on a mission trip, feeding kids with no restaurant kitchen and no supplier order sheet — still the batch we are proudest of.

And Now, the Oil

Which brings us to why we are writing all of this down now.

For seventeen years, the same cold-pressed olive oil has been behind everything described above. Every gyro. Every marinade. Every batch of weekly hummus. Every drizzle over grilled veggies. It was never a product to us. It was the most-used tool in the building.

Not a lab. Not a marketing department. A real kitchen, serving real food. That's the only credential that matters.

So we bottled it. Three oils — Extra Virgin, Garlic, and Rosemary Garlic — in the same 16 oz squeeze bottles with precision spouts that we use behind the line, under the Since 2009 seal. It is the closest thing we can ship you to the reason the food tastes the way it does.

It started with a three-hour lunch on a Greek island. It turned into three restaurants, an award-winning gyro, 68,000 gyros in year one and a great many more since, and seventeen years of somebody else's memories. Now the part that made all of it work is available for your kitchen.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy your experience at Glory Bound Gyro Co. It's a lovely day for a gyro.

Sources

• Gyros — Wikipedia
• Restaurant Hospitality — Best Sandwiches in America 2018
• Mashed — The Absolute Best Gyros in the U.S.