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CHAPTER 1

An unceremonious start

Imagine you’re 16 years old, you have just returned from your father’s funeral and the next moment a set of keys is placed in your hand. It’s not a symbolic gesture; it’s an order from your mother to go and open your father’s restaurant, and run it for the rest of the day. Things have irreversibly changed. You will no longer go to school. You will run the family restaurant in downtown Johannesburg.

The restaurant, the Good Hope Café, was in Main Street, opposite where the Carlton Hotel would be built in 1973. At this time, in the late 1920s, it served breakfast, lunch and dinner, had a varied menu, and had become very popular. Back then all restaurants were called “cafés”, and the heart of Johannesburg was still frequented by the well-heeled. A meal cost you sixpence (5c).

The restaurant was established by Malama and Spiros Halamandres, who came to South Africa from the Greek island of Lemnos at the end of the Anglo Boer War in 1902. The authorities in Athens had not yet started keeping record of people emigrating from Greece.

The Greek diaspora had begun in ancient times, and continued through the Middle Ages to modern times. After the Greek War of Independence (1821 – 1832) and the Treaty of Constantinople some families returned to the homeland. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, economic factors drove many away to a host of countries, including the United States of America, Australia and South Africa. Why the couple’s surname was rewritten as Halamandres in the Roman script, and not Halamandaris, is open to speculation. Did an immigration official make the mistake when they first came to South Africa, or the bank clerk who opened their account? Whatever happened, being Greek and accustomed to the Greek alphabet, they didn’t immediately realise the mistake.

Malama and Spiros lived in Germiston and had five children. Their eldest son, George, was born in 1911.

His father’s premature death from a heart attack in 1927, when George was at the tender age of 16, proved to be the abrupt kick-start to his business journey, which would culminate in him founding the food and beverage giant Famous Brands.

It fell to George to put his four brothers through school, and then, at Malama’s insistence, through medical school. “My grandmother, who was only two bricks and a tickey tall, was quite a forceful woman and her sons were petrified of her until the day of her death,” says John Halamandres, George’s youngest son.

The food business was a tough one, she decided, and the four younger brothers, Otto, Costa, Alf and Nicky, were not to join the family business, but rather be sent to a top medical training establishment – regardless of how many meals had to be sold to accomplish it. They were all trained at Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London, known today as King’s Health Partners.

Costa, the second brother, became a gynaecologist in Johannesburg. Alf, a general practitioner, moved to Toronto, Canada, and hyphenated the surname to Halam-Andres to anglicise the pronunciation. Otto became a maxillofacial surgeon in Durban. Nicky, the eccentric youngest son, gave up his studies in his residency year and never worked. He got married in London, but divorced very quickly and returned to South Africa, where Malama and George looked after him.

Sadly, Nicky died of health complications related to obesity. None of the doctors in the family tasted the success that would eventually come George’s way. “Maybe the Halamandres family has an addictive gene, because my father’s siblings all gambled their success away,” says John.

“The fact that my father had to leave school to help his mother in the business was something he never let his brothers forget,” says John. “My grandmother must have helped him a lot in the Good Hope Café, but he liked to take credit for its success. It cost him a lot of blood, sweat and tears, he used to say.”

In 1939, when he was 28, George Halamandres married Kaliope Poulos, who was 20. Poppy, as she was called, was also born in South Africa, and their home language was English. Their first son, George Jr, or Georgie as he was called, was born a year after the marriage.

In 1951, when Georgie was 11 years old, his family decided to emigrate to California.

According to his nephew Peter Caradas, George sold the Good Hope Café to a cousin before he left for America. Malama and George kept ownership of the buildings the restaurant occupied, and Malama later lived above the premises until her death in 1973. John says that George didn’t work in America and wanted to remain retired. Peter remembers that some foreign-exchange issue made George decide to return to South Africa.

But not before he saw a lot of development and innovation in the American food industry. He was in America just as the brothers McDonald overhauled their burger drive-in to make speed the core of the business, and introduced assembly-line procedures. He might even have seen the cover story American Restaurant Magazine ran in July 1952 on the success of their concept. Barbara Halamandres (née McFarlane), who later married Georgie, says, “George came back with all these ideas, press clippings and catering magazines – and he had his famous black book in which he jotted down ideas and inspirations.”

John, the second son of George and Poppy, was born in 1953, 13 years after his brother, while the family was living in an apartment in Joubert Park in Johannesburg. Poppy and her sister, Lulu, bought a house in Observatory a year later. Lulu, who had been married to the Springbok spin bowler Xenophon Balaskas, got divorced from him and she and her children, Arthur and Maloma, were also looking for a place to stay. Soon Georgie and Arthur became as close as brothers, and they attended Marist Brothers College (today Sacred Heart College) together.

Within a year or two George also welcomed Peter Caradas, whose father was a first cousin of Poppy’s, into his home. Peter’s father had died and it was difficult for him to attend Marist Brothers from where his mother lived in Turffontein. “He loved me like a son, and he loved Arthur like a son,” says Peter.

In spite of bringing those ideas and inspirations back to the country of his birth, George remained semi-retired until 1957, when he got itchy feet and a little bored. He also wanted to give his eldest son a job, as well as his son’s best friend and cousin, Arthur, both boys were turning 18.

So, for the first time, out came George’s famous black book.