From Outsider To Industry Leader
Posted by estiator at 10 October, at 06 : 42 AM Print
COVER STORY
By Constantine N. Kolitsas
Ari Thanos charts a course for continued growth.
As Greek American restauranteurs, all of us are familiar with the common path to restaurant ownership for first-generation Greek Americans. Most of us have lived it, haven’t we? As sons and daughters of Greek immigrants, many of us have grown up in restaurants and have taken over family businesses. We’ve breathed the air all our lives, and have worked our way from bussers to dishwashers, from line cooks to sous chefs, from hosts to servers, ending up as managers before being given the golden keys to the kingdom.
Like us, Aristidis Thanos is a first-generation Greek American. And like us, he is a restaurateur. But unlike us, his path to restaurant ownership started at the top. And today he is the owner of a restaurant group that is preparing to open its fifth restaurant.
“A customer had flown me to Atlanta to DJ a party,” says Thanos, referring to his pre-restaurant career as we discuss his origin story. “I had finished college and was planning on going to grad school. While I was there in Atlanta, one of the people asked if I wanted to take over the Landmark Diner in Ossining.”
Thanos had grown up in nearby Dobbs Ferry, the son of Greek immigrants from Kalambaka and a village near Metsovo. Unlike some of his childhood friends at the Prophet Elias parish in Yonkers, Thanos never worked in any of the area’s Greek diners or restaurants. His father, Nikolaos, whom he lost in November, was a controls engineer, while his mother, Despina, worked as a Greek school teacher. The only experience he had in the business was mixing music at night clubs and bars, and at catering halls for weddings and events.
But the opportunity intrigued him. The 180-seatLandmark Diner had gone through a dozen or more operators in a short span, none of whom could make a go of it. With nothing to lose, he jumped at the chance. The year was 2002.
“On the day I took over, half of the staff walked out,” remembers Thanos, indicating that the previous operator was angry at being removed from the business and convinced key personnel to figuratively, if not literally, follow him out the door. And so, Thanos had to learn quickly, jumping behind the line with the cooks to get orders out. “I had a cousin that was visiting from Greece,” he says. “I stuck him in the dining room and made him the front-of-house manager. Except for the phrase ‘Everything okay?’, the poor guy didn’t speak any English.”
The business at the time was doing less than $15,000per week, he says; a number that enabled him to learn as he went. And he learned, even if it meant he still had to work periodic gigs as a DJ to keep the bills afloat. Within three months he had successfully grown the business to the point that he was able to purchase the property.
“First I cleaned up the place, and then I cleaned up the books,” he says of those early days.
Having proven himself with the success of the Landmark Diner, Thanos was soon asked to join his former landlord as partner of a group in Atlanta that went on to open eight restaurants, all the while growing the Thanos Restaurant Group (of which he is sole proprietor) in Connecticut and Westchester. In 2007 he sold his interest in the Atlanta group to focus exclusively on his home base.
“I took a different approach from many of my friends in the business,” says Thanos, who had studied and earned business degrees from Mercy University in New York’s Westchester County.
“As Greeks, we can be suspicious of people,” he says. “I knew that to be successful, I would need good people I could trust. And by putting systems in place, I was able to hold people accountable.”
By way of a simple illustration, where most Greek diners still have someone standing at a cash register near the door, Thanos uses the server bank system traditionally embraced by upscale restaurants and chains (servers keep their own banks and settle out at the end of the shift according to the cash report generated by the restaurant’s POS system).
Currently, the restaurant group owns and operates five establishments: the Stamford Diner (opened in2017); the Mirage Restaurant & Café in New Rochelle (2019); The Stillery in Stamford (2019);The Royal Green in Stamford (opened after Covid for parties, and opening soon for fine dining); with the Pleasantville Diner coming into the fold as this issue of Estiator goes to press. Sadly, the Landmark Diner suffered an early demise at the hands of a devastating fire in 2019. (With the restaurant operating, a fire started in the air-conditioning unit that could not be controlled, and the building burned to the ground.)
With an organization whose growth has been steady, Thanos learned early on that he would need to delegate many of the executive responsibilities. To wit, Laura O’Brien holds the position of Corporate General Manager, while the role of Corporate Chef is held by Oscar Rivera. Recently, he also brought on a corporate trainer and corporate beverage manager to round out the team.
Thanos had to learn quickly, jumping behind the line with the cooks to get orders out. “I had a cousin that was visiting from Greece,” he says. “I stuck him in the dining room and made him the front-of-house manager.
“Our culture is at once corporate culture and a family culture,” he says, indicating that the company’s hiring, training, and inventory functions are centralized, with systems that create accountability across the organization. “But our key ingredient is our people, and each one is valuable tome and to the organization. We’ve got staff members from different backgrounds, all of whom contribute in their own way to the success of our organization, or the success of our restaurant group.”
And if the fresh ingredients mantra gets a bit overused by every eatery under the sun, when it comes to his restaurants, it’s the customers who do the boasting.
Promoting from within the organization is not simply important to the company, he says, it’s part of his growth strategy, indicating that it’s important to spend time finding the right positions for the right people. “A busser at the Landmark Diner became server at the Stamford Diner and was eventually promoted to General Manager of one of our locations,” he says, an indication that staff development is something he takes seriously.
The Restaurants and Some Great Exposure
Of the five restaurants in his portfolio, The Royal Green (situated on a golf course) is a banquet facility (set to expand to become an upscale eatery in the coming months), and The Stillery is an elevated pub. And while each operation has its own brand, it’s the upscale and contemporary approach to the diner concept with which the Thanos Restaurant Group is most readily identified.
Diners today are evolving, with a focus on quality ingredients, picture-perfect plate presentation, and menu choices that reflect the public’s growing appreciation of different foods and the fusing of cuisines, he says. Menu items at his three diner concepts span the spectrum. Looking at just the breakfast entries (available all day, of course), customers can choose from steel cut oatmeal and Fage Greek yogurt with seasonal fruits and berries on the healthy side to French toast topped with house-made cannoli cream, chocolate chips, and whipped cream on the not-so-healthy side. And as diners are the great democratizers of the food world; you can grab a bagel for under $4or indulge in skirt steak and eggs for $30. Feeling a spark of culinary wanderlust? Huevos rancheros (eggs over refried beans with pepper jack cheese, guacamole, and corn tortillas) will take you to Mexico, while a classic Western omelet will keep your feet firmly within U.S. borders. Of course, as with any good diner menu, the breakfast items are just a springboard to an extensive list of burgers, wraps, sandwiches, soups, salads, pastas, steaks, and other entrees.
“We stand out because we take a scratch approach to most of our menu,” says Thanos, indicating that even the burger meat for the turkey burgers served at his restaurants is ground in-house. And if the fresh ingredients mantra gets a bit overused by every eatery under the sun, when it comes to his restaurants, it’s the customers who do the boasting. So much so that the Food Network’s Guy Fieri took notice and paid the Stamford Diner a visit for an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives that aired last August. “Guy and his team came in, and we prepared our chicken matzoh ball soup and hot turkey sandwich for his viewers,” says Thanos, two dishes, while always big sellers that are poised to become signatures of the restaurant.
In the weeks since the episode aired, the response has been immediate and significant. “We went from making 1,000 matzoh balls a week to making 3,000,” says Thanos, with people coming from as far as Boston and the tip of Long Island to see what the fuss is all about.
Food is important to the Thanos organization. If it sounds clichéd, it’s none-the less not always a given.“We don’t cut corners,” he insists. “For example, all the beef we serve is certified Angus; even the cranberry sauce we serve with our turkey is homemade.”
When it comes to his menu and pricing, he doesn’t look to what others are charging for similar dishes; he sets his prices based on the quality and cost of the ingredients that he puts on the plate. This way, he isn’t always scavenging the market for the lowest prices but instead sticks to a quality proposition when he makes his purchases. The strategy guarantees his profit margins while providing his guests the level of quality they pay for. Key to the strategy, of course, is a very good relationship with his purveyors—a relationship that guarantees an uninterrupted supply chain for critical ingredients as well as consistent quality levels for those ingredients.
Personally Speaking
To say the last two decades for Thanos have been busy, is, of course, an under-statement. Growing two restaurant groups (one in NY/Connecticut and one in Atlanta), being involved in other businesses, and serving a stint as Chairman of the Pan Gregorian of Upper New York has kept him moving at a nonstop break-neck pace. That’s all well and good for the young man in his 20s or 30s that Thanos was when he got into the business. But as he hit his40s, it all caught up when he suffered a heart attack.
“Beginning with the fire at the Landmark Diner in2019, I had a number of personal obstacles,” he says, indicating that the loss of both of his wife’s parents to Covid and his heart attack two years ago were the catalysts for him tore-prioritize. “Family and health come first,” he says, «and then the business. After all, if you don’t have your health, you are of no help to the business, and if you don’t stop and appreciate your family, then there’s no point to the business to begin with.”
Tammy, whom he calls his “wife and life partner, «has been supportive of the sacrifices he’s made along the way. And so it is that he is dedicated to spending six weeks of the summer with his wife and three children in Greece each year.
Moving Forward
If Thanos seems to have stumbled his way into the restaurant industry, there is a strategy to his path forward, with a plan to continue acquiring restaurants.
“We don’t cut corners,” he insists. “For example, all the beef we serve is certified Angus; even the cranberry sauce we serve with our turkey is homemade.”
“Many restaurateurs from the previous generation are looking to retire, «he says, indicating that he is open to facilitating buyouts. “These are people that have put their lives into their business; have put their blood, sweat, and tears into it; have made sacrifice after sacrifice. And they reach an age where it’s time to hand it off, but their children have moved into professions and they don’t have anyone to take over. They don’t want their doors to shutter, to see the end of their life’s work. What they want is a great operator in thereto bring back the business and to make it as great as it could be. Those are the businesses that I want to purchase. It’s all about finding the right deal,» he says. “And for it to be right, it has to be right on both sides – for the buyer and for the seller.”
And as with his previous acquisitions, his strategy is to keep existing staff in place, implementing his systems and building on existing foundations.“I’m essentially looking for businesses that need a new parent,” he says. “We go in, and we help them to learn to walk again, so to speak. We go in, clean it up, update it, put in systems, and grow sales. Sometimes I ask myself why I’m doing this, but it’s what I’m good at—and I have a great team with me that is great at making it happen.”
