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It’s Friday, 5:30 p.m., an hour one usually associates with tea and biscuits, or in Greece a frappé, yet Kozi’s, a South African restaurant, is pleasantly abuzz with diners tucking into massive steaks and inch-thick burgers. As we stand by the counter waiting for the owner to appear and watching the meat sizzling on the grill, we can’t help smiling. The young woman near the till asks, “Why are you smiling?”

“There’s such a happy atmosphere in this place,” we reply.

And that’s before we’ve taken a sip from the shot glass of warm oinomelo, red wine and honey, Kozi’s welcoming aperitif; studied the jazzy, red-backed print on the wall with African sayings; or tried to read the mottos on the staff’s T-shirts, where the funky letters echo the colors of the South African flag – “The sons of lions are always lions,” “It’s better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life” – and before Kozi himself has described the philosophy behind his restaurant.

Kozi, whose name is the South African abbreviation of Constantinos, came to Greece with his family from Johannesburg in 2001, when he was 18. He is the youngest of four and had no choice.

Wearing jeans and a black hoodie with the Kozi’s logo, he starts his story. “I didn’t want to come, but my father had been planning to move ever since he left his birthplace on the Turkish island of Imbros [in the Dardanelles] in 1967. He had a supermarket in South Africa and every year he’d say, ‘This will be it,’ but 34 years went by before it finally happened.

“I studied international communications at Deree College here and then spent six months in London, where all my ideas started falling into place and opened my eyes to the restaurant business. I’d always wanted to do something with meat, because the thing I missed most about South Africa was our braais, the most social form of eating together, standing around an open fire drinking beer and cooking meat.

“But I wanted my restaurant to be unique, something you wouldn’t find on every street corner. And I think its success is due to the fact that it lies somewhere between a souvlaki joint and a five-star restaurant. After seeing Chinese restaurants with four-page menus, I decided to keep it simple, focus on beef, pork and chicken, and make it special.”

And special it is. When we lunched here in late November, we almost swooned, our Super Chakalaka steak and Porco Porco tenderloin were so perfectly cooked and so utterly tasty, rubbed with spicy marinades and served with sauces so delectable we could not stop eating, though “stuffed” would not begin to describe our condition. We kept looking at each other and beaming, then cutting off another mouthful or dipping a divinely fried potato into the juices on our plates.

Surprisingly, Kozi has no culinary training but he knew what he wanted.

“[The writer] Kazantzakis talked about the four pillars of this world: wine, bread, fire and woman. That to me is the essence of what the place should be – it’s my motto, though I don’t provide the women,” he says with a broad smile.

“We started small, and in the five years since we opened, we’ve expanded twice, going from eight to 40 tables, without any advertising apart from word of mouth. Before we began, I bought 30 kilos of meat and we practiced, practiced, practiced for six months. My cooks are from Bangladesh, far from home like me, and I’ve trained them so mistakes are rare. Our spices are prepared for us in South Africa, so that’s the easy part. But meat is difficult, every piece is different, depending on the season, what the animal has been eating. It’s a constant challenge.”

Then Kozi mentions something astonishing. The team has been together for the whole five years, no firings, no dropouts. The supplier has remained the same, too, understanding the need to keep standards high.

“We support each other, learn from our mistakes, and keep the continuity, which is so important.”

But the real glue is Kozi’s large and dedicated family; each member takes turns supervising the flow from grill to table and back and manning the till. Kozi’s father, Basil, lends a commanding presence with a gentle smile and serene face; his mother, Stella, a plump, sweet woman in gloves and shower cap, makes the burger mix, sauces, salad dressings and sweets like cheesecakes, panna cotta, chocolate mousse and sublime walnut cake (karydopita) and spends her free time surfing food sites on the web; his brother, Sasi (Thanassi), makes the tiramisu and oversees the waiters; while his sisters, Demetra and Korina, both help behind the counter. Demetra and her husband, graphic artists, also designed the menu, placemats, T-shirts and logo.

With the restaurant open every day from noon to midnight, several of them are always present, and always smiling, with their eyes as well as their mouths. Their interest and kefi (conviviality) are shared by the waiters and even the cooks, who as Stella says, “are always positive.”

“We serve large portions as we want our customers to be physically but also psychologically nourished,” Kozi continues. “We keep our prices affordable since we’d like people to be able to come often, not just as a treat once a month, and we want them to find a smiling face when they enter and leave with a smile on their own face.”

Their recipe obviously works. Even during this period of shrinking incomes, Kozi’s is full every night. This may be why customers show up outside traditional meal times, since there are no reservations. What’s more, everyone obeys Kozi’s no smoking rules without protest. The only smoke comes from that grill. And you may not need to study the menu – divided into appetizers, burgers, pitas, salads and meat, including South African sausages – just watch what’s carried to other tables and point.

The wine list is short, with local and South African vintages, though you may want to stick to a perfectly drinkable house red or white if your wallet feels thin, or beer, though small breweries are disappointingly absent. Our only other caveat: when all 40 tables are occupied it can get noisy.

But we’ll go back and often, if not for the meat and the touch of spice, then for the uplifting embrace of those smiling happy faces, the expressions of people who love what they are doing and take pride in doing it well, even though, as Kozi says, it’s like running a marathon every day.

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Published on January 13, 2015

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