The Team
Demetri Gregorakis — General Manager
Demetri has spent his career opening restaurants and then refusing to stop noticing things — how many seconds a guest stands there before someone speaks, whether the second cup is as good as the first, what the room feels like at 6:04 on a slow Tuesday.
He's built teams, opened doors, and written the systems that keep a restaurant honest. His conviction is that hospitality is a designed thing — that "warm" isn't a personality you hope to hire, but a hundred small decisions made deliberately, over and over, until they harden into culture.
There's a symmetry to his being here. Years ago, at 29 years old, Demetri opened the first restaurant under his own name in this very room — same walls, same light, a very different life. After the hard lessons that come with walking away from a business, he left with a burning desire to learn. So he built a career in hospitality management one launch at a time, and came back to the place that started it all. He'll tell you it's the best room in Sacramento. He's been saying it for a decade.
What he wants from Chariot is uncomplicated: that you leave better than you arrived, and can't entirely explain why.
He and Joseph met in this room in 2013 — Demetri owned it then, and Joseph was the one filling it with events. Thirteen years later the room is Joseph's and Demetri works for him. The room changed hands; the friendship never did.
Robert Mason — Head of Bar Service
Robert was twenty when a bar in San Jose hired him and then worked out he couldn't legally touch a bottle yet, so they put him on the door instead. He spent those months learning people before he was ever allowed to pour them anything — who was comfortable, who wasn't, who just needed someone to say hello first. Two men took it from there. Six years at Ink Eats & Drinks in Sacramento, where the man running the bar pulled him out from behind the barback station and decided he was a bartender, and later the craft side, properly, under Matt Nerge at Red Rabbit. He'll tell you both of them changed his life. He says it plainly, the way you'd say it about family — because somebody chose to spend their time on him, and he has never once forgotten what that was worth.
Robert is a father, and the same instinct shows up on the floor. He has taught a lot of young bartenders how to stand in front of a room, and he does it the way you'd want it done for your own kid: patient, exacting, and completely unwilling to let someone stay small when he can see what they could be. The only thing that gets under his skin is a nod where a question should have been. He'd rather you asked. He'd rather you asked twice. Nobody working beside him is left to guess, and nobody is left behind.
What he wants out of a night is uncomplicated and nearly impossible: every guest all the way there, and every person on his bar a little further along than they were that morning. He'll catch the wrong glass from across a full room and have it fixed before you've looked up — and then he'll show you how he saw it.
Christopher Lee — Executive Sous Chef
Chef Christopher runs the line. He belongs to the school that believes ambition in a kitchen is proven in the fundamentals — stock that took the time it takes, eggs cooked by someone paying attention, bread that earns its place on the plate. He is unromantic about technique and deeply romantic about ingredients, which is the correct ratio.
A kitchen serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner out of one room is a hard trick. It asks for range, discipline, and a temperament that doesn't fray at hour eleven.Christopher has all three. He cooks seasonally because it tastes better, sources carefully because it matters, and holds the food to the same standard at 7:15 in the morning as at 7:15 at night.
If your plate arrives looking simple, understand that this is the most difficult thing to do.
And our amazing team members
The rest of the room is the rest of the reason. The baristas who learn how you take it. The servers who read a table before it speaks. The cooks who never meet you and cook like they will. We hire for warmth and train for skill, in that order, because the second one is teachable.
We tell them all the same thing, and we'll tell you too:
Gather Well