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Dimitri wanted a Niko Niko's on every block. When he graduated
high school he dreamed of opening 150 stores. Pete Pappas
told him it's better to have one good restaurant and be
able to sleep. "But I wanted more than one," Dimitri
says. He rented an old pizza joint on the corner of San
Felipe and Winrock. "That's how I got my dad to come
back from Vegas," he says. Dimitri needed help, and
he didn't want to work with his mother.
The new cafe was a full-service sit-down restaurant with
tablecloths, china and linen napkins instead of the bare
wood benches, Styrofoam plates and paper towels at his mom's
place. It didn't work. "He tried to be too high-class,"
Pete says.
After
a few months Dimitri fired the waiters, moved the register
to the front and went back to the old way. But he was 19 years
old, and when the money came in, he says, he started doing
what his brothers had done when they ran the business: He
put his newly earned dollars down G-strings. He had a table
at Caligula and stopped paying the bills. "I was going
out all the time," Dimitri says. "History was repeating
itself." His father told him to straighten up. When he
didn't, Chris told him he was on his own and went back to
Vegas. Every night, his mother came straight from her restaurant
to work at his so he could make enough money to pay the rent.
She fried fish in the kitchen, then sang to the customers.
"My mother was always there; she stood by my side --
screaming and yelling -- but holding me up," Dimitri
says.
He was about to file bankruptcy when someone bought the
store. Dimitri took the money to Vegas to patch things up
with his father; they played craps for three days, then
spent a month in Greece before Dimitri came home to work
for his mother. Business boomed.
"It's always struck me as kinda grubby but well loved,"
Teresa Byrne-Dodge, editor and publisher of My Table, says
of Niko Niko's. "I remember sitting under the air conditioner,
it leaked on me, dripped on my head. But it's endured."
One reason for the popularity, she thinks, is that Greek
food is a fairly healthy, low-fat choice. The foods are
prepared with simple spices, olive oil, oregano, garlic
and lemon, she says. "The flavors are very clear; they're
not subtle," she says. "It's not like Mexican
cooking -- mole sauce has 20 ingredients. Greek food is
a little more straightforward."
It's simpler than other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern
foods, says Ben Berryhill, executive chef at Cafe Annie.
"Simple is what always turns me on," he says.
He goes to Niko Niko's about three times a week, and his
wife eats there almost every day. "It's country cuisine;
it's home cooking developed to satisfy and satiate and make
people feel comfortable and that they've had an experience
-- as opposed to fine dining, which is more with the artistic
flair and the inspiration and creativity and all that."
He loves that he can get a lamb shank "braised to
perfection" that rivals the most expensive restaurants
in town, but at Niko Niko's he can eat it on a paper plate.
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