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CHAPTER 7

Arrival, departure and in memoriam

In the Halamandaris family museum in Livadoxori on Lemnos hangs a picture of two boys, a four-year-old standing next to a chair and a baby sitting on it in a pink dress. The parents of Peter and Fanis Halamandaris, Nicolaos and Ourania, had been sure that their second child would be a little girl, and when another boy arrived, they couldn’t afford to discard the dress they had bought in anticipation.

Coming from a poor background isn’t something that bothers Theofanis, or Fanis, Halamandaris. But he does admit that all his life he has been trying to prove himself. When, like his brother Peter, he had to start attending senior school in Myrina away from home, the local boys – “the sugar boys” from a more privileged background – teased: “You speak differently; you come from the village.”

That kind of thing upsets you when you’re young, he says, and then you decide to prove that you’re better than those looking down on you. “That made us stronger,” he says. “I thought, at the end of the year I will show you the numbers.” He was among the top five in his class.

When Fanis had convinced his father that he had to do his matric in Athens to stand a better chance of going to university, the Athenians teased him too – for coming from an island. Again, he pitted his brain against them and “showed them the numbers”. “I survived in underground accommodation, on bread, watermelon and milk; after all that you fancy your stomach is full,” he laughs.

After spending more than two years in the army, he returned to Athens but never completed his tertiary studies as his politics were too left-leaning for the government’s liking. “I could smell fire in Cyprus,” he says about Turkey’s imminent occupation of the northern part of the island in 1974, after a coup backed by Greece’s military junta.

So on 18 May, 1974 Fanis followed his brother to South Africa.

Peter invited him to work with him, but his wife, Soula, who also came from Lemnos, was pregnant with their first child, Nic. The business could barely sustain Peter and Soula, so Fanis declined his brother’s offer. Soula would work until the very last day of her pregnancy. Fortunately, they could count on Paulos Mthethwa to look after the restaurant while Peter was with her at the hospital – after Paulos had only worked for them for a month.

“The first English words I learnt were ‘salt and vinegar?’” Fanis laughs about his hours behind the food counter in the Honeydew supermarket where he opted to work. He stayed in a single room, worked 18-hour days, listened to music that was banned in Greece at the time, and read the books of writer and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis, such as Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, which had also been banned.

“What could you do – you were there for the money,” he says, and shrugs his shoulders.

His uncle George Halamandres also asked him to work for him in the commissary, but the salary he offered was far lower than what Fanis earned as supermarket manager.

Then, in 1976, in the wake of the Soweto uprising on 16 June, Peter and Fanis put their heads together. Soula, who had been assaulted, a brick shoved in her face, while she was working for her brother in his supermarket, got very nervous about their adopted country. The brothers decided it was not wise to have all their eggs in one basket. “Let one stay, let one go back to Greece, and let us keep our options open, we said,” recalls Peter. Greece had become a democratic republic after a referendum in 1975 and was now a more attractive option.

The Steers in Bellevue thus got a new owner. Fanis had saved up R15 000 by living like a hermit. He bought the restaurant for R40 000 and promised to pay his brother the balance later.

His English was still not the best. He used to phone the Portuguese grocer, order his 20 bags of potatoes and five boxes of tomatoes and then slam the phone down. “I knew if he asked about the weather, I would be in trouble,” Fanis says with a laugh.

At least he had his uncle for company early in the mornings. George opened the central kitchen and would then come around for coffee and a chat. “He loved me so much, like a son,” remembers Fanis. After a while Fanis realised, however, that the visits delayed him and he never had time to do his preparations for the day. “Then I figured out if I asked my uncle to lend me R50, he would leave rather quickly. He liked to make money, but he didn’t like parting with it.”

Paulos Mthethwa, who had been employed by George and had begun to work for Peter before Fanis took over, says George often dropped in for a toasted bacon and egg sandwich. “Every Sunday you’d see him.”

One day when the butcher didn’t deliver the 23kg of mince Fanis had ordered and he went to the butchery himself, he saw to his dismay the man was taking the meat from a pile in direct sunlight. That was it. He started sourcing his own meat, ordered a huge mincer and began to make his own mince. “The system sometimes pushes you to change,” he says.

Fanis customised his kitchen, sorted out griller problems and got to know the product intimately. “I perfected the temperature at which to heat up a roll, I got the feel for exactly what size it should be for a burger to fit nicely in your hands and experimented with the amount of sauce for a particular size patty. I wanted to achieve the best taste experience possible.”

Once again, Fanis gradually won the respect of those who saw him in action. “I worked like a robot and my customers realised that,” he says. He’s sure the five busiest outlets today can’t produce what he did with the help of his staff. “We used up 100 packets of a dozen rolls each a day.” People drove from as far afield as Pretoria to have a Steers burger. “I had to wrap them in tin foil for them,” he says.

Fanis had entered into the franchising empire just in time. “At its height my father had or franchised probably 45 outlets in the Steer and Burger Ranch stables,” says John. On the back of a Steer steak ranch menu of that time you count 27 outlets in the Johannesburg area, 13 in Durban, three in Cape Town and one in Israel.

But the Halamandres family would remember 1976 for more than the historic Soweto riots that almost set the country on fire. It was the year Georgie died.

In those days, one would go to a hotel to have a drink, since there were no bars as they are known today. From what the family was told, Georgie had an argument with someone at the Carlton Hotel and a fist fight broke out. He was eventually thrown down some stairs in the parking lot and ended up in hospital with three or four broken ribs.

Peter Caradas found Georgie after the brawl: “It seemed as if he was just sleeping; it didn’t even look as if he had been in a fight.” He took him to hospital and told Georgie to stay there until he could come to fetch him, as Georgie had sent him off to the Carlton Steers: “Go, go to the restaurant!” It got very busy there in the mornings towards lunch time.

Later that morning Georgie decided to check himself out of hospital, even though he was advised not to do so. His friend Jacques du Buisson took him to his home in Bryanston.

Everyone was worried until Jacques phoned to explain where Georgie was. They were also upset that Georgie had checked himself out against the doctor’s orders. But he said he’d had many rib injuries when he boxed and didn’t need to be in hospital.

Georgie was lying down in the late afternoon when Jacques’ wife, Margaret, asked if she could bring him something to eat. Georgie asked for avocado on toast. He had a bite or two and then seemed to fall asleep, so the friends who were gathered at Jacques’ home left the room. Later, he still seemed to be asleep so the Du Buissons also went to bed.

In the morning they found him in the same position. He had choked to death without any visible sign while all the friends were with him in the room. He was 36 years old.

At the time of his death, Georgie’s daughter, Stacey, was only six. His wife, Barbara, became suicidally depressed. Poppy withdrew into herself even further and became more spiritual. For his father, George Halamandres, it was a blow from which he would never recover. “My father was so crestfallen and became so dispirited and without hope following the tragedy that he sought relief in alcohol, which maybe once again points to addictive genes in our family,” says John.

“Georgie was perhaps a bit spoilt by his father, and he liked women, but he was a good man and a good worker,” says Fanis.

Stacey says she remembers her father well, and maybe she also knows him from family lore. “He was a bit of a playboy; he first had a yellow Maserati, and then a Mercedes cabriolet, a gold one, those old ones. He took me for drives and showed off. He was very good-looking and quite a womaniser, partier and drinker. We used to watch the Wits university rag parade together from his Steers at the foot of the bridge in Rissik Street.”

The late Joe Hamilton, who had been the Robertsons Spice sales manager dealing with the family for a number of years by this stage, also remembered Georgie as being overindulged by his father, wealthy and a philanderer. Joe was interviewed for this book shortly before he passed away at the end of 2012.

“You’ll never hear anyone say a bad word about Georgie,” says Barbara, “Georgie cared about people. He was generous to a fault, he loved fun, and he loved going out.”

While Georgie was still alive, all his best efforts more or less held things together even though he was struggling to keep the many franchisees happy. But following his death, things weren’t going so well. There was nobody to run the franchise operations, George had withdrawn from the business, and the political situation in South Africa was creating a lot of uncertainty.

“We started losing the franchise businesses because we couldn’t manage them, and the economy was also declining,” remembers John. “When people’s 10-year franchise agreements expired, they didn’t renew them.”

The business started to fall apart.

Peter Caradas says that George began to rely on him more after Georgie died. “He taught me how to deal with landlords, and I became quite good at that. The longest lease I ever signed was for six months, even though everyone wanted a five-year lease. That is what he taught me to do. I used to say, ‘I’ll give you a three-month lease.’ If someone can’t rent out his property again in that amount of time, it isn’t a good property, Uncle George used to say.”

But eventually stress and maybe the excesses of the good life too, got to Peter. He had a heart attack in 1980, and after several operations he started getting involved in other industries and withdrew from the family business.

Another setback was that Stanley Adelson of Longhorn Steer no longer saw his way forward under the Halamandres umbrella.

He says there was never a rift with the family, but John was still too young when Georgie died and there was nobody to take the reins. “I was very close to the Halamandres and Balaskas families, but when Georgie passed away things started to fall apart and we found ourselves being the actual leaders of the group. After discussions with George we came to a mutual agreement to go our own way,” he says. “I always remained close to Lulu and Poppy, who ran the commissary.”

They dropped the Steer from the Longhorn name and became Longhorn Great Steaks.

“We still supplied them with sauces, salad dressings and spices. We just no longer received royalties,” remembers John.

Stanley recalls that Longhorn came up with something new after that. “In those days we had a very plain basting for the steaks made up of oil and oregano and I believed that for Longhorn to compete with Highwayman and Squires, we needed to get a new basting. I hooked up with a Renaldo from the Black Angus in Cape Town and paid him R5 000 for a basting that unfortunately didn’t work out.” His next option was George Catsavalos, who had created his own basting for the Highwayman, and after months of negotiations he consented to make an exclusive sauce for Longhorn. “That basting catapulted Longhorn into one of the most popular family-style steakhouses in South Africa.”

Stanley left for Canada in 1986, but his partners were contracted to stay on at the business for a year with the new owners, Squires Loft. With them Longhorn enjoyed a successful listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, but would in time become the victim of bad management. This would not be the end of the Longhorn brand though. The dying bull still had some kick in it.

Today, Stanley is president and COO of the Firkin Group of Pubs in Ontario, which manages 32 pubs. “But after being in the hospitality business for nearly 46 years, Longhorn still remains my baby,” he declares.

While the younger generation were flourishing, the domination of the steakhouse market by George Halamandres kept dwindling. Still, all was not lost.