In the online community ellines.com an article was registered that refers to Kostas Spiliadis, who is well known in Kythera. The successful businessman with the famous Milos restaurants, has a special love for the island of Kythera, as he visits it often, and has bought property in the historic traditional settlement of Aroniadika, intending to establish a gastronomy academy there.
As the ellines.com Kostas Spiliadis is an intelligent entrepreneur, who has managed to bring seafood to the forefront of the art of nutrition and gourmet cuisine, while he has conquered the top of international gastronomy, having owned the well-known «Milos» restaurants, with all of them having a clientele that includes celebrities to tycoons.
The kitchens of «Milos» restaurants do not experiment with high gastronomy, but focus on meticulous gastronomy, with Kostas Spiliadis« passion for perfection extending to everything he sees, tastes or owns. As a result, »Milos" is the triumph of the authentic over the artistic, as the New York Times, among others, wrote.
Kostas Spiliadis was born and raised in Patras and was the son of a military judge from Filia, a mountainous village in the Peloponnese. His mother was born and raised in Istanbul and gave him a cosmopolitan view of food. He loved music from a young age and when he left for America to study at 19 in 1966, he took with him the songs of the mountains and the refugees, the traditional music that was booming in Greece at the time and that made him who he is, as he has said.
Arriving in Manhattan, he stayed in a room at the Young Men's Christian Union and cried every night, missing home, the big city overwhelming him and feeling completely lost. After a while, he moved into a private house on 14th Street, taking a room so small that he had to climb into bed to reach the window.
Because he had a student visa, he was not allowed to work and the money his parents could send him was limited due to the restrictions imposed by the Greek government. In his room he cooked chicken necks, which cost very little, and befriended another Greek who had come to New York and worked in a hot-dog shop in Times Square. From there, he would get two or three hot dogs that his friend managed to give him hidden in the sourdough.
He soon left for the University of Maryland to be closer to his older brother, Stelios, who was attending Johns Hopkins. His brother has said that Kostas was always an intellectual and political man and that if someone told them that his future would be in business and restaurants, he would reply that it would never happen.
It was the period of the junta in Greece and Kostas Spiliadis participated in demonstrations and political actions, even though his student visa forbade it. He admired the academic environment of the university, where he was studying Sociology, but not the Maryland of the time, where segregationist logic dominated the buses and toilets.
Moreover, he felt humiliated by the fact that his Greek origin was not appreciated. Everyone, including his friends, called him Gus, not Kostas. To him, this detail was not insignificant, since he had been named after his father's cousin, who had been executed by the Germans in a massacre with 3,000 victims during World War II.
Finishing his fourth year at Maryland, without a degree, Kostas Spiliadis had problems with both the university and the junta and was in danger of not having his passport renewed. At the same time, he feared that if he returned to Greece, he would be taken into the army or arrested. So, in 1971, he left for Canada with a young friend. «I knew that Montreal had a very strong Greek community that was against the junta, and that was all I knew,» he says.
In Canada, he found what he could not find in America - a multicultural atmosphere that gave newcomers a place in society without forcing them to abandon their cultural identity. There one is integrated, not assimilated, in the words of the businessman. «Canada was opening doors, providing educational opportunities, civic education and employment opportunities. They gave you all the tools to become part of society.».
Kostas Spiliadis got a degree and started his postgraduate studies, although he never completed his thesis on the political economy of Greek immigration. «I wrote and rewrote,» he says, «I'm one of those people who don't complete things.».
He helped found Radio Centre-Ville, a local radio station where he directed the Greek program and had a daily news, interviews and cultural news show for the Greek community. At the same time, he acted in the local theatre, where he even starred in a play about the Greek revolution against the Ottomans.
In 1979, he left radio to open the first Milos, the start of his culinary empire above the Filoxenia pub he had run for a year in the Mile End area. His «staff» consisted of a dishwasher and himself in the role of cook.
«I did it because I needed to prove that Greek cuisine and Greek culture were not as bad as everyone thought,» he says, even though he couldn't cook at all and would call his mother in Greece and ask her about the preparations.
He tried to differentiate himself from the previous image of Greek restaurants with moussaka and create a new culture around food «Greece is blessed with thousands of islands, wonderful fish and seafood, like the whole Mediterranean. So, it made sense for me to create a cuisine that focused on the treasures of the sea,’ he has said in an interview.
Mr.Spiliadis opened his first restaurant at a time when chefs were beginning to disregard tradition and innovations such as «Californian cuisine» and molecular gastronomy were emerging. He decided to ignore all that, to stay true to simplicity and purity.
Today it owns six restaurants in the heart of the world, in cities such as Montreal, New York, Las Vegas, Miami, London and Athens, and is preparing for its seventh in Manhattan in February 2019, in the iconic new skyscraper at 34th Street and 11th Avenue.
The fresh fish that arrives daily from Greece and the Mediterranean are displayed in the restaurant's restaurants, while an expert advises customers on the best way to cook the fish they want. The «Milos» restaurants are thoughtful and airy, reminiscent of open markets, with a minimalist Mediterranean style. There one sees ancient amphorae and well-heeled customers walking in front of the fish display case, choosing what to eat.
David Samuels, owner of Blue Ribbon Fish Company in New York, recalls the early days of Milos in Montreal, when Kostas Spiliadis drove 750 miles to and from the Fulton fish market in a Chevrolet Impala borrowed from one of his waiters. Eventually, he put so many miles on that car that he was forced at one point to buy it because of the smell of fish that was now left inside.
«At that time we were selling fish by the 100s,» says Mr. Samuels. «Kostas wanted individual fish. Usually the customer would take one look at the box of fish, we would negotiate the price and he would decide if he would take it. Not Kostas. Kostas had to pick the fish one by one.» When the New York Times editor asked him if Mr. Spiliades had mellowed over the years, he laughed and replied that «He's gotten worse. It's not arrogance. It's the enormous pressure he puts on himself. You see that in athletes. It doesn't matter how many times they have won, it's the fear of failure.».
Kostas Spiliadis can be in any of them at any time. In the kitchen, in the dining room or supervising the arrival of fresh fish. If he sees something wrong, he becomes furious, no detail escapes him. His son, George Spiliadis, beverage manager for the Milos group, admits that it is not easy to work for his father.
«I demand everything to be perfect, because my culture demands perfection,» he says. «When I charge as much as I charge, the world demands perfection. I have nothing else to give. I'm not a top chef. People judge me based on the experience I bring to the table.».
At the end of 1980, a year after it opened, Milos was packed every night. David Dangoor, one of the first customers, recalls, «I had been to the best restaurants in the world and I would come to this hole in the wall in Montreal - with the narrow entrance, the ugly wooden planks, as if it had never been decorated - and enjoy one of the best meals of my life.».
In the beginning, the food at Milos was homemade, the menu was limited to seven or eight dishes. But then Mr. Spiliadis« paradoxical culinary training began. He perfected the »Milos« Special, carefully fried eggplant and zucchini, with the help of a Greek doctor who worked at a hospital in Montreal, and a Greek man from Pyrgos who owned a jewelry store next door to his restaurant had told him that Mr. Spiliadis didn't know how to make the fish and taught him how to do it. A Jewish customer, who came from a neighborhood in Alexandria, Egypt, where Greeks and Jews lived side by side, helped him perfect his ribs.
Kostas Spiliadis, for his part, took care of his customers. One of them, for example, ate in his restaurant five days a week for 25 years and always asked him to turn off the air conditioning. When the Greek businessman renovated the restaurant in 1987, he turned off the air vent above the table where he usually sat.
His friend and colleague, Lenny Lighter, has said that «From my table I could see into the kitchen. Kostas would cut a thin slice from each melon, take a bite and throw it in the trash. I realized he was checking each melon himself before serving it.».
Kostas Spiliadis, writes the New York Times, is a philosophical, cultured, intellectual, artistically inclined, romantic and proud, especially to be Greek. Every night, for at least an hour, he reads poetry and literature and can recite dozens of poems by Greek poets outside. He is not described as reserved by his surroundings. He can be exaggerated, touchy, insecure, melancholic and ruthless. Especially when he walks into one of his restaurants and not everything is as he wants it to be.
Kostas Spiliadis lives with his wife, Dina, in Montreal, but also has an apartment in New York, near Carnegie Hall. «I stop by there every night,» he says. «I see the great concerts going on. I want to go and I never make it,» he adds. He opened all the Milos restaurants himself, living in each place for months at a time, no matter how far from home he was. He hardly ever rests. «I wish I could,» he says with a sigh. «It doesn't make sense to be obsessed, but it's part of who I am. It doesn't always make me happy,» he confesses.
Kostas Spiliadis is passionate about his family and his grandchildren. He especially loves Kythera, where he has bought the historic centre of Aroniadiki and plans to open an academy of Greek gastronomy.
In addition, he owns the company «Milos Yacht», with which he guides foreign visitors in yachts to dozens of Greek islands, offering unforgettable experiences in the enchanting corners of Greece. «Cava Spiliadis» sells excellent quality Greek wines in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, California and in selected LCBO Vintages stores of the Canadian Monopoly. It also sponsors several concert performances of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.
The basic principles that led him to success, as he says, «Honesty, hospitality and raw materials, which have the dominant role. I use high quality ingredients, with minimal intervention on my part. I am the intermediary to get the products from nature to the table. I support the purity of flavours».
This is a man who managed to evolve from an almost impoverished immigrant to a highly successful businessman, transforming Greek cuisine in North America and helping to completely change the image of Greek cuisine.
