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TJ Kola was barely out of fourth grade when he learned there are some things you can’t measure your way out of. He’d always trusted numbers and math — he can still recite the digits of his kids’ Social Security numbers, the license plate of his first car, menu prices from a decade ago.
But grief doesn’t add up like a column of numbers. He lost his mother when he was 10, and then, a few years later, a brother. His father withdrew into a grief of his own, and Kola, still a teenager, was largely left to figure out life by himself. He did.
Now, sitting outside the Mount Sinai restaurant he built out of a failed deli, he’s applying that same grit and fortitude to the biggest gamble of his career: leaving a place he’s sustained for the last 13 years and starting over, about a mile up the road.
Mavi Grill, the Mediterranean restaurant that anchors a stretch of North Country Road, is relocating to a brand-new plaza at 515 Route 25A, located at the foot of the entrance to Mount Sinai High School.
Brand new plaza on busy Route 25A
The plaza is also expected to house a bakery, a barbershop and a winery store. It’s a lineup Kola is confident will turn the plaza into a destination.
“Everything’s gonna be brand new,” Kola said, a cup of Turkish tea in hand. “Good vibe, good atmosphere.”
The move has been a year and a half in the making. Kola signed the lease in November 2024 expecting keys within six months. But he didn’t end up getting them until June 1 of this year. He’s aiming for a fall opening, hopefully in October.
The new space will roughly double his current footprint, with room for 40 to 50 seats inside and three or four tables outside, positioned along a thoroughfare that carries tens of thousands of cars every day.
He’s taking only a couple of refrigerators from the old location. Nearly everything else, down to the tables and the kitchen hood, will be new, he said.
For the first time, Mavi Grill will pour wine and beer. The new location will also rebrand as Mavi Mediterranean Grill.
The resilience of TJ Kola
Kola, 45, grew up near Turkey’s Black Sea coast, in a childhood defined early by loss.
After his mother’s death, an older sister took in his younger brother while Kola stayed behind with their father, largely on his own, cooking for himself and leaning on neighbors.
One of his brothers died a few years later, not long after finishing his service in the Turkish army. Kola worked part-time restaurant jobs as a teenager and once dreamed of becoming a math teacher — noting to Greater Long Island that he’s always had a head for numbers — but restaurant work pulled him in instead.
For about nine years, he bounced around jobs managing hotels and restaurants in Turkey. Then came the big move to Los Angeles in 2007.
Meeting Lauren at Coaches in LA
It was there, working as a manager at Coaches Mediterranean Grill, that he met a regular customer named Lauren. She was a Long Island native whose father, Vincent Iaria, had risen to chief probation officer in Suffolk County before relocating the family to California.
When the Iarias moved a few years later to the Scottsdale, Arizona, area, Kola tagged along. The couple welcomed their first child in Arizona, before the pull of Long Island brought Kola, his wife and the Iaria family east in 2009.
Just a few months after moving to the Miller Place area, found himself staring at a struggling deli on North Country Road that had already burned through one failed ownership change, and failed at an attempt to become a burgers and fries joint.
Kola signed a lease for the location, positioned at the corner of North Country and Mount Sinai-Coram rods. He said he sank roughly $100,000 into the buildout before Mavi opened in 2013.
Restraint among the keys to success
What’s kept people coming back, he said, isn’t a secret ingredient, attributing the restaurant’s popularity to restraint. The menu offers three salads and exactly one house dressing, a balsamic recipe Kola invented and refuses to let his staff modify.
His hummus recipe comes from the Los Angeles restaurant where he first learned to cook it. He follows it, he says, to the letter.
“Too much variety gives you a headache,” Kola said. “Simple is better.”
These days, Kola lives in Mount Sinai with his wife and two children — a daughter entering 10th grade at Mount Sinai High School this fall, and a son in fourth grade.
His wife’s cousin David, whom he calls his brother-in-law, has worked the restaurant with him since it opened. Lauren Kola works the counter four days a week.
Asked what keeps him coming back to the kitchen every day after 13 years, Kola doesn’t reach for anything sentimental.
“When I go in the kitchen, I like to cook,” he said, before pausing. “You just gotta put in the work to make it happen. But I like the work.”
Top photo: TJ and Lauren Kola in front of the current location of Mavi Grill (taken by Brian Harmon).
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