Family has found meaning in burgers
At Ellas, a father-and-son team are cleaving a legacy
This is a story about immigration, a Pape Ave. butcher who wanted a better life for his kids, and selling meat in the era of Beyond Meat and veganism.
But it’s not the story you might expect. Ellas Meat Market is thriving and, despite his father’s pleas, George Laganas, 40, is a shop fixture. Smiling broadly, he jokes with staff and customers, cleaver surgically dissecting a beef side atop an old-style butcher’s block.
“I kind of hated it,” George says of his introduction, at age 13, to working in the shop his dad bought 30 years ago. It’s a lament generations of GTA newcomers share, helping get family businesses established while friends play and watch TV. Many escaped to other professions.
“Dad told me: ‘I don’t care if you’re the boss’s son, you have to start like everyone else,’ so I cleaned toilets, swept, took out the garbage,” says the lean, bearded Laganas. “As soon as I finished school I came to the shop and sometimes I’d be here six days a week.”
His parents Theo and Athena worked harder. Before buying Ellas — after leaving Athens for Toronto, then moving back to Greece twice before returning for good — Theo for a time worked daily at a Greektown butcher shop until 5 p.m. and then as a waiter until 2 a.m.
As a business owner, the hours were almost as long. Athena looked after George and his big sister Joanna and their Don Mills-area home, while working at a deli and later a grocery
GREEKTOWN continued on GT2
store. Theo cut meat, chatted to customers, visited farms and did the books, often seven days a week.
“We almost never saw our dad,” George says, recalling his shock and excitement one evening when Theo unexpectedly left the shop early to watch his teenage son play soccer.
“That was the biggest highlight of my life,” George says, beaming. “I was the goalie and unfortunately I let in four goals that night, but it didn’t matter. It was the best surprise a teenager can ever have.”
Joanna, 43, doesn’t begrudge her time in the shop just south of Danforth Ave. She learned young how to speak to adults and honed her math skills working the till.
“It was great, a wonderful experience for us growing up — but it was definitely busy,” she says.
Her parents encouraged both kids to go to university and find a life beyond burgers and lamb.
Joanna did. Working at a daycare when she was 16, one-onone with a boy on the autism spectrum, she helped him make important strides and started on the path to full-time teaching.
George went to York University for sociology, gaining, he says, valuable insights into human behaviour. But in his final year, he told Theo he wanted to use that knowledge at Ellas.
Theo says he responded: “‘It’s a hard job and you have no time for you or your family. I want you to be educated, I want you to have a better life than me.’ ”
George picks it up. “Dad said ‘OK, can you just apply to teachers’ college?’ I applied and I got in and he said ‘Well?’ I said ‘If I ever need to, I can go.’
“I saw that I don’t want to be stuck in a classroom for the rest of my life,” George says, adding he loves talking to customers and the “art” of making them happy with his handiwork. “As a teacher I’d have less hours, a pension, summers off, but my happiness outweighed those other things.
“Dad said ‘George, are you sure?’ ‘Yes.’ That was it, dad started showing me the ropes.”
Together, today, they run Ellas. George is now officially the boss but his dad, 68, works parttime so George can go home for dinner with his wife, newborn and 3-year-old.
The shop has doubled in size over the years, and more than doubled business. George credits his father for changing with the gentrifying times. When clientele dropped from about 90 per cent Greek to 40 per cent, he stocked less lamb, adding more beef and prepped products. When supermarket onestop shopping was the rage, Theo kept visiting farmers and increased the quality of their cuts. Eventually specialty shops came back into fashion.
They know change won’t stop. Father and son recently chatted about mail-order meat, the Amazon age of internet shopping, but aren’t ready to join it yet.
They are also a little out of step with the brazen world of branding. They paid, with another business, for a few thousand dollars’ worth of fireworks in Withrow Park on Victoria Day. But they didn’t advertise their generosity. “The people, they know,” Theo says with a shrug.
And don’t look for Beyond Meat-style veggie burgers in Ellas any time soon. “I have nothing against it,” George says, arching an eyebrow at the idea of a meatless world, “but you have you looked at the ingredients?” Veganism, he adds, is a fine choice “but me, I’m a meata-tarian.”
Theo says the work and sacrifice — leaving a good life in Athens twice, the final time propelled by a bad experience with Greek health care, has been worth it. He’s not surprised his work paid off in a better life for his kids, but is surprised to have one still by his side.
“Canada has been great to us, the best,” he says. “And George is so good with people, better than me. When people tell me about my son, taller than the CN Tower — that’s how I feel.
“I love it,” he says of working in Ellas after three decades, surrounded by George, five employees and a steady stream of hungry visitors.
“I think I’m going to die young if I stay home. I want to live. I want to live.”