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.