Jeannie Terilli opened her restaurant on Lower Greenville in 1985 after flipping a coin. Heads meant opening a restaurant. Tails meant continuing to dig 5-gallon holes in Texas summer heat running her landscape company. It came up heads. Forty-one years later, Terilli’s is still at 2815 Greenville Avenue, still running live music six nights a week, still pouring martinis with hand-stuffed blue cheese olives, and still serving dishes named after members of the family who built the place.
Her son Joey and her daughter Amanda Ahern now help run the room, and a second location — Terilli’s To Go, in the former Val’s Cheesecake space just down Greenville — bringing weekday lunch service back to the neighborhood for the first time since the pandemic. That last detail is the one that tells you what kind of restaurant this is.
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