Recipe for Success

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The American notion of teenagers having summer jobs was a foreign concept for Lexington restaurateur Ilias Pappas. Pappas, owner of Athenian Grill, grew up in Lamia, Greece, noting that Greeks typically first enter the workforce around age 25.

Not only was the entrepreneur not wanting to wait that long to hit the ground running, he was willing to move to another country to do it.

Pappas, who describes himself as an active teenager, said while he wanted to play soccer and be involved with other sports, his primary interest was to follow the lead of his parents, who worked really hard to support him and his brother. 

“I wanted to work,” he said.

In 1998, Pappas followed in the footsteps of his aunt, Louiza Ouraniou, and moved to Lexington. He started working in her restaurant and others while studying hospitality administration/management at the University of Kentucky. 

On her visits back home to Greece, Ouraniou had witnessed her nephew’s potential, and she knew he’d also inherited his grandmother’s love for cooking and its ability to bring people together.

Ouraniou, who notes that Pappas still uses her own special lamb chop marinade in his restaurants, is retired from the restaurant business now, but she stops in often to check on her nephew and enjoy meals from his family of restaurants.

“He is the hardest working person I’ve ever met,” she said. “He cherishes the time we spend together, and also with his wife and son.”

After a couple years at UK, Pappas transferred to Florida International University, where he studied management information systems and business. 

“From the beginning, I had passion for the food, but I also had a passion for the business,” he said.

During a decade spent in Miami, Pappas honed his culinary skills and soaked up as much real-life information as he could outside the classroom about the intricacies of the restaurant business, from employers and other experts in the field.

In 2011, he returned to Lexington eager to open his own restaurant. His first step was to open a pop-up Greek food truck serving the local brewery circuit; the following year, he launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund a brick-and-mortar. The first location of Athenian Grill restaurant, opened in 2013, at 313 S. Ashland Ave.

He pre-sold meals to buy the equipment to furnish the restaurant’s kitchen; from there, growth came swiftly and steadily, dish by dish. 

One key to Pappas’ success is his ability to continuously reassess operations and make changes as needed. He opened a location at The Summit at Fritz Farm that later closed, and another at Locust Hill, which he later repurposed as a catering kitchen. In 2019, he opened an Athenian Grill location in the Park Plaza apartment complex on East Main Street.

This summer, he opened Athenian Grill’s newest location, on Mall Road near Fayette Mall. With a similar menu to the Chevy Chase and Park Plaza locations, the new restaurant offers more seating than those locations and allows customers the option of either ordering at the counter or opting for sit-down table service, for a more relaxed dining experience. 

Pappas said flexibility is baked into his business philosophy as much as using family recipes and only serving dishes that he personally enjoys eating (knowing that customers will, too). He’s built his menus from recipes that would be served in the homes of his family and friends in Greece, with appetizer items that include Greek sausage, traditional hummus, and spanikopita, and main courses ranging from gyros and falafel to grilled lamb chops, chicken Santorini, and Moussaka, a traditional Greek casserole with eggplant, ground beef, tomato and béchamel sauce. Decadent homemade sweets, like baklava and a Greek orange cake called portokalopita round off the menu.

For the past few years, Pappas’s food dynasty has included University of Kentucky’s Training Table dining facility, which offers football team members meals designed to satisfy their unique nutritional needs for training and performance while also pleasing their palates.

Josh Pruitt, UK’s director of football operations, said the relationship between Pappas and his program began four or five years ago.

“We were just trying to come up with ideas and different things to provide our players that would be something they would enjoy on a daily basis and change on a daily basis,” he said.

With 115-150 hungry athletes to feed two to three times daily, each with distinct dietary needs, Aramark officials proposed that Athenian Grill run the facility’s kitchen as a restaurant of sorts, using its own employees who are held to high standards of prepping, plating and cooking healthy yet tasty options with locally-sourced ingredients and input from sports dieticians.

“Ilias has done a great job of being able to provide that for us for the past couple of years,” Pruitt said.

To make such a vast operation go smoothly, the Athenian Grill staff must work as a unit much like the sports team they serve, with the support of the university and Aramark.

“It’s an extremely large operation on a daily basis,” Pruitt said. “It’s kind of like a Vegas buffet that never stops.”

Pappas said the UK venture gave him confidence to pursue non-Greek concepts even beyond Kentucky’s borders. 

Partnering with hospitality firms like Aramark and Levy Restaurants, his staff now provides food at universities in South Carolina, Tennessee and Ohio. For example, at Miami University in Ohio, he operates a southwestern food ghost kitchen.

A goal for 2026 is for Athenian Grill to enter the Louisville area, followed by expansion into Cincinnati and Indianapolis markets. 

Pappas is even taking a bite out of the Big Apple, with Levy having selected him to open an Athenian Grill at the market at Javits Center in New York. A fast casual Greek concept called Yeero Greek Eatery is also set to debut in New York in mid-November.

“We’re pretty proud that a company that started in Lexington, supported by Lexington, has been chosen to be at the Mecca of food,” Pappas said.

With so many local, expanding and far-flung projects, another piece of the spanikopita (Greek pie) for Pappas is to have a chef-driven management style for each restaurant.

And among his roughly 200 employees, Pappas has curated a group of trusted, adept professionals to whom he confidently delegates day-to-day tasks, such as HR, finance, culinary support and more.

“We continue developing the team daily and recruiting,” he said. “I have a team around me focused on the different departments.”

That leaves him time to seek potential expansion properties and new opportunities, meet with clients, and travel. He visits his various properties as often as possible to check in, especially the local ones.

He also treasures and prioritizes time with family including his son George, 5, and travels back to Greece for a few weeks in the slower early summer season. There, he finds new flavors and inspirations to add to his menus.

Pappas was hesitant to discuss other ventures like real estate, saying they might distract from his primary focus — his culinary career. But just as an entree is enhanced by its side dishes, this restaurateur has made forays into the real estate sector as a co-owner in the Greek luxury home co-ownership firm Owners.gr.

Even with all his successes to date, Pappas, 45, said he faces any challenges by simply focusing on food, its flavor and execution, doing a good job and building something positive, prioritizing results and trying not to take on more than he can handle.

“I call myself a doer. I get things done,” he said. “That’s my focus.We only took on projects that we knew we could do an extremely good job at.” 

Pappas expressed deep appreciation for the Lexington community, which he said has been “an incredible support to me and the family.”

“No matter what, I’m always going to be extremely thankful for that,” he said. 

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