The move to Berea wasn’t quite what George had wished for.
“My father had great hopes, as there were many apartment buildings with lots of residents, but he was wrong about the customers,” says John. There were no families, just single people, and no parking. “The singles didn’t match the profile of our consumer base and the restaurant did mediocre business at best,” remembers John.
Peter Halamandaris wasn’t going to stay in Berea either. His uncle said he couldn’t live with him anymore once he was married, and that on his salary he wouldn’t be able to support his wife anyway. Peter started to look around for a small business opportunity of his own.
John turned 19 in 1972 and was supposed to join the air force after finishing his schooling at Damelin. But because of the hearing problem he had inherited from his mother, he was discharged after only a week.
The young man was ready to travel the world. His friend Colin at the Bellevue takeaway, a hippy with long hair and takkies, decided to go with John when he took a gap year in the United Kingdom.
This was the chance that Peter was waiting for, and he bought the Bellevue Steers in Bezuidenhout Street from John and Colin. “I borrowed 50 per cent of the asking price to give to Colin, and the other half I owed John. He was very lenient about the loan and even allowed me to buy a second-hand Mazda 626 before I paid him back.”
Peter was to make a great success of Bellevue. “The restaurant was so small that John’s mother had to deliver the precooked chips; there was no space to prepare them,” he remembers. He was at the back, and after he married, his wife, Soula, served at the front.
“You have to try to make friends with a customer; you can’t see them as someone to take money from,” he says. “We knew nothing about food,” he says, but his uncle George taught them everything he knew.
During those early years they only closed for Christmas, because they had to by law, and for New Year. The only other time they closed was when the fridge broke down and they couldn’t store any meat.
It was a difficult time for Peter, because at first he didn’t even own a car. A lot of franchisees make the mistake of thinking that the cash in the till is theirs, Peter says. “You first have to pay everyone else, and then, if there is something left, it’s yours.”
“I was a bad franchisee,” he says, as he was convinced he could buy raw materials cheaper elsewhere than from the central kitchen. “I knew all the tricks!” he laughs.
Antonia Phepi, who still works in the canteen at the Famous Brands head office, started working for Peter in the kitchen and as cashier during that time. She says he used to tell staff: “If you want something, ask me, but just don’t steal from me.”
Meanwhile, John was staying with his cousin Arthur, who had become a yoga teacher in the United Kingdom. John practised yoga and travelled around Europe.
“I had a great time, but after nine months I had to return to South Africa. My father had written to me that they needed me back in the country,” says John. On his return, he started running the Seven Steer in Berea. But he wasn’t the only one whose arrival was eagerly anticipated.
Let’s Call it Steers
1975 to 1989
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.”
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