Читать книгу From Corner Café to JSE Giant - Carié Maas - Страница 14

CHAPTER 9

A rebirth and two funerals

His brother was getting married, he hadn’t seen him for a long time, and a little bureaucratic hurdle such as a visa wasn’t going to get in his way. That, everyone will tell you, is just how Peter and Fanis’s brother, Periklis (Perry) Halamandaris, is. It was 1980, Fanis was getting married to Anita and he needed a best man in Johannesburg.

Perry had first applied for a South African visa a couple of years previously. Immediately after school he helped his father in his business, like Peter before him, but in 1972, at the age of 17, he wanted to join his eldest brother in Johannesburg, to avoid serving in the army. So when he didn’t get that visa, he went to Australia.

He got married, worked in a clothing factory for a while, then in a sweet factory, and after that he and a friend started to import arcade games from Taiwan. They had a deal with Colombia Films to set up in the forecourts of all their cinemas. “We were in all the movie houses,” Perry remembers.

But now Perry needed to fly to South Africa for his brother’s wedding and he hadn’t applied for a visa. At the airport he tried his luck with a long, sad story of not having seen his brother in a decade. With the intervention of the pilot, who didn’t want to hold up the plane any longer, the South African ambassador in Canberra eventually granted Perry a “telex visa”. Once on South African soil, the special visa caused confusion: The customs official had never seen such a thing. Her supervisor gave it one look and decided such a strange visa could only mean Perry was a member of the secret police, and granted the unwitting and enterprising traveller a multiple-entry diplomatic visa valid for 10 years.

While at Fanis’s wedding, Nicolaos Halamandaris urged his sons to join forces in business, and the three brothers decided that out of respect for him they would do just that. Perry was not happily married in Australia, got divorced and decided to immigrate to South Africa.

His plan was to sell arcade games again, but in the meantime Fanis wanted to visit Greece for three months and convinced Perry to take care of the takeaway outlet in Bellevue while he was away. The R4 000 in profits he was allowed to keep convinced Perry that this was the kind of business he liked.

He then decided to open a “Jamaica Foods” opposite the swimming pool in Raleigh Street in Yeoville. His uncle George wasn’t too happy about the idea, as he feared the Black Steer opposite King Edward VII was too close. The name and tropical trees had already been put on the walls when he and Fanis nevertheless decided: “Let’s call it Steers.” So they opened a diner with that name on 1 December, 1981.

At this time Fanis started feeling he wanted to spread his wings a little. With his new wife at the counter the turnover had already doubled “because she talked to the customers so much” and now he wanted to do more. He felt confined by his franchise agreement and told his uncle that he wanted to be in business for himself. Of course his uncle had to cut him down to size, he laughs. “He was right – it would have been unethical to do my own thing.”

But in June 1982 Fanis got the opportunity for growth he was looking for. He was approached to buy the troubled Burger Bonanza in the newly expanded Sandton City. The seller, who had bought the restaurant for his girlfriend, found that the larger outlet was too big for her to run.

Fanis and Perry decided to contact Peter in Greece, who wasn’t too happy with the political dispensation there anyway. Peter had been working in construction in Athens, first with a partner and then on his own. He says he didn’t make money and didn’t lose money either, but “Greece was dead”. He battled to get loan capital from the banks. Peter was glad to come back to South Africa, and had even brought his parents to see the country during his stay in Greece.

Together, Peter, Fanis and Perry forked out R102 000 for the Sandton outlet, which was “big money” at the time, Fanis recalls.

Once again their uncle had his doubts. He was worried that the nearby liquor store might attract unruly types and deter more affluent customers. “But we told him we don’t play cards or horses; we play business,” says Fanis.

“I lost 8kg from stressing during that first week of opening up,” he remembers. All the customers were going to the eight shops next to theirs, and not to that Steers takeaway. But slowly shoppers saw what was on offer. They started trickling in, and coming back. Within two months the eateries around them had closed down, and Steers was a roaring success, says Fanis. People were waiting outside as they opened the outlet, and at night it was virtually impossible to close, because new patrons kept coming.

Fanis put his mother-in-law, Arety Constandi, in the Bellevue outlet, Peter worked mostly in Yeoville and Fanis and Perry in Sandton. By now they had pooled all the businesses, as their father wanted.

In Sandton Fanis also experienced what every franchisee fears more than anything – an attempted robbery. He was lucky. “I always tell people to immediately give everything the robbers ask for, but I put up a fight. Fortunately someone close by started screaming and the thugs ran away.”

“We had a lot of problems,” remembers Peter. “The department of health had these stupid laws; they wanted the kitchen to have only a tiny window so that customers could barely see in, and we wanted them to see the whole kitchen.” Then they weren’t allowed to have uniforms in black and red, the corporate colours in those days – they had to be white. “What is the problem as long as they are clean?” he asks, still grumpy at the thought.

The customers also had their own ideas. They first insisted on salt and vinegar instead of the barbeque sauce the brothers had put out, and when they grew accustomed to the new taste they demanded that the sauce bottles be brought back onto the counter. “They made soup with the chips!” he complains about their excesses.

Nevertheless, the brothers had struck gold in Sandton, and soon Steers was the talk of the town again.

“It was right that you didn’t listen to me,” their uncle George said.

It was actually a customer who planted the seed for the revival of franchising. Perry recalls that he had a Jewish customer who would come for a burger every Thursday evening. “Perry, your uncle was very, very successful, and we enjoyed his food – you have to start franchising again,” the architect said. For the life of him he can’t remember the patron’s surname, but when he bumped into Philip years later in George, the man was so delighted that he hugged and kissed him: “Perry! You! I am so glad you listened to me!”

When the three brothers talked to their uncle about opening more restaurants, but with a promise to do it under a different name, he had a generous suggestion: “Why change the name? And why don’t you all come together, all the cousins; my son John is young, and he will be alone.” According to Peter, the idea that Steers was going back into franchising pleased his uncle George.

So the four decided that Peter, Fanis and Perry would put 25 per cent of the Sandton City outlet into the deal, and John 25 per cent of the commissary. They called the new company First Steer. Joe Hamilton also had a small share of the commissary income.

On 23 June, 1983 they put a small advertisement in The Star for prospective franchisees, and got a huge response. Family lore says that at least 250 people called on the first day alone.

“We changed our small storeroom in Sandton City to an office,” says Perry. The beginning of the Steers franchise was among bags of potatoes stacked to the ceiling, and a couple of Coca-Cola cases and a piece of wood served as a desk and chair. This was at a time when Perry and Peter were still sharing that red Mazda with a boot that would no longer close.

“Could you see people investing with us?” laughs Fanis about it today.

The first franchise went to Stratos Efstathiou, in Norkem Park, Kempton Park, in a spot where there had been a Burger Ranch.

The four cousins weren’t letting grass grow under their feet, and in the same week in November 1983 Blackheath Steers and the Edenvale Steers opened. Perry remembers the date well, because he would be married to his fiancée, Vasso, within six months.

Things were coming along so nicely that the three Halamandaris brothers decided they could do with more help at Sandton. Who else to call on but their little brother Charalambos, or Babis, who was still in Greece? So on 2 February, 1984 Babis arrived in South Africa.

While still at school in Myrina he had applied to go to America to study computer science to try and avoid the army like Perry before him, but the paperwork was delayed and he couldn’t go. After doing his 23 months in uniform, he joined a hotel school in Athens.

“The tourist industry had just started in Greece,” says Babis. Because of his work experience after school at Akti Myrina, the top hotel on Lemnos, he was placed among the 10 best students and could choose where he wanted to work afterwards. He chose the five-star Astir Palace Hotel in Vouliagmeni, a seaside town just south of Athens.

His arrival in South Africa was less luxurious.

After an extra-long flight (at the time, South African Airways wasn’t allowed to fly over Africa), Babis found himself working at the Bellevue Steers within an hour of his arrival. “We’re busy,” said Fanis. So, like a younger brother should, Babis started cutting rolls and putting on patties. He had come to learn, after all.

In a couple of months he would run the Sandton Steers on his own. When Uncle George dropped in at Bellevue for a toasted chicken mayonnaise sandwich, he had some fatherly advice for Babis that would stand him in good stead later in his life. “You won’t make money by standing behind the counter; you will make money when a crazy person offers you crazy money for your restaurant.” And then his uncle would take another five Cokes and leave.

In that year the family oversaw the opening of only five or six outlets, but the potential was obvious.

“This is going to be a monster,” George had said to his brother Otto the year before.

But George’s health was deteriorating and his wife had terminal cancer. Before he passed away, he called John and Stacey to his bedroom. She was 16, and he told her that John would look after her. She recalls he said to John, “I can’t give Barbara the money, because she isn’t Greek and she gambles and she has been suicidal since Georgie died, but I am making you the trustee to look after Stacey when I’m gone.”

George died in October 1984 at the age of 73. Ironically, he passed away the way his son Georgie did: by choking on food.

“I was living with them at the time, but had been at my girlfriend’s house,” recalls John. “Our domestic worker ran all of 4km to come and tell me that my father was choking, but by the time we got there, he was already gone.”

Poppy, his wife, passed away two months later.

“Riddled with cancer, Yiayia would still come and jump with me on the trampoline. And I still miss my grandfather every day of my life. I had the best grandparents,” says Stacey.

John says he truly regrets that his father never saw the real success the business would achieve. “His strongest points, more so than being a great businessman, were to conceptualise, and he had the courage to give form to ideas nobody had even heard of here. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he used to say.”

He says his father would have been delighted with where Famous Brands is today.

Apart from his obsession with cleanliness, and with the importance of service and quality of product, George is also remembered by the family for his offbeat humour and sayings, some of which were a bit risqué.

Peter says if there was one message that came from his uncle’s mouth again and again, it was this: “Don’t play with your customer. Give him the best.”

Nick Christelis, a family member who later became the group’s attorney, says when you met George “you immediately got the impression of just how knowledgeable he was about the restaurant trade”. Perry agrees that Uncle George started something really great.

“He was the father of the steakhouse in South Africa, and of franchising, and he never got the recognition he should have had for that,” says Fanis. There were a number of other firsts: the revolutionary equipment he had imported, the pioneering takeaway franchises, and his venturing into Africa and Israel in the early 1970s were all bold and groundbreaking initiatives in the food industry.

And he wasn’t a father for his two sons only. Just like Peter Caradas, Arthur Balaskas and Fanis Halamandaris, the Famous Brands driver Lukas Sanda­wana says George Halamandres treated him like a son when he immigrated from Rhodesia at the age of 19. “I was born in the same year as Georgie, and he treated me as a piccaninny; he treated me like his child.

“That wonderful man didn’t know colour. I cry tears if I think of those people – I will always remember what that family did for me.”