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Wanting to open a restaurant (without a partner), Chris
went to Pete Pappas and told him about his bad luck; he
said he had lost his money and needed a fresh start. "He
looked like he was deserving of another chance," says
Pete, now 81. Pete asked if he was a gambler. 
"Yes," Chris said. "I am."
"Me too," Pete said. "Take whatever you
want." He gave Chris all the equipment he needed and
told Chris to pay him back when he started making money.
"He saw my dad was a risk taker," Dimitri says.
"People told him he was crazy trying to sell gyros
to cowboys." The walk-up window opened May 1, 1977.
They made $15 the first day. A week later Channel 11 and
the newspapers came, and customers followed; they cleared
$1,100 a day. "They started out gangbusters,"
Pete says. "It was a gamble going in. I didn't think
it was gonna do too good. But I was fooled."
At first they just had picnic tables that they chained
down at night. Soon they enclosed a seating area and Eleni
hung fake grapes from the ceiling and painted a mural of
Athens on the wall. "You could probably pluck it out
of Montrose and stick it in Greece," says Michael Massa,
the owner of Massa's. "His food is almost better than
the food we had in Greece." It was three years before
Chris told Eleni the recipe for the fish and chips.
In 1980 they opened Mana, Eleni's steak house a few blocks
over. It did well, but Chris wanted to go home. The year
Maria started college at the University of Texas in Austin,
Chris sold the steak house, left the two oldest boys in
charge of Niko Niko's and moved his wife and son to Chios.
"They were done," Dimitri says. "He wanted
to retire."
But after a few months they were back in Houston. Eleni
says they came home because she missed her children. Dimitri
says it's a more complicated story, the boys weren't running
the place like they should, they were partying instead of
paying bills. "My parents freaked out -- we're not
very serious people -- but Niko Niko's we take very seriously,"
Dimitri says. "There's too much depending on it."
Dimitri says Chris didn't feel like the boys were respecting
his authority as their father and he was tired of it. He
wanted to sell everything and move back to Greece. "He
wanted to get out," Dimitri says. But Eleni didn't
want to be that far away from her kids -- and she had grown
to like America and air-conditioning. Chris wanted her to
move with him to Vegas. "I said, 'No. You'll gamble
and we'll be out on the street,' " she says. "So
we divorce."
She sighs. "It's my fault too," she says. "I'm
mean. I cared more for my children." Chris left half
the property to Dimitri and half to Eleni -- he told her
to take care of his boy and left. She cried every morning
and every evening; in between she worked. This was her third
divorce, but the other two hadn't hurt this hard because
she hadn't cared for the other men as much. "So I work,
work, work and forget," she says. She worked from 9
a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week. With the money she earned,
Eleni paid for her daughter's undergraduate, master's and
medical degrees.
In Vegas, Chris started running games again.
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