As the Durham sky gets darker and darker on Thursday nights, the lights in the offices of the Wachovia mini-skyscraper off West Main Street turn off and the ones downstairs at Café PariZäde light up. At 8 p.m., those bankers and some alumni in town for the weekend and a group of well-off students dine on $26 lamb chops and $19 bouillabaisse. They sit in big leather thrones, surrounded by classy-enough surrealist paintings in a brightly lit dining room, where business chatter drowns out elevator music.
By 9:45, the dining has ceased and men in suits are speed-walking in between tables and chairs that other men in aprons and slacks are lifting out of the dining room. It's an almost military process, and the only thing that's truly calm in this sprawling restaurant is the muscular wraparound bar.
It's 10:30 now, and the staff--the three bartenders bracing for attack in the front, the DJ flipping through his Top 40 collection in the back, the bouncers preparing wristbands and warming up their growls at the door--is just waiting. The nighttime clientele, meanwhile, are busy zipping up their knee-high boots and putting in their collar-stays for Thursdays at P-zades--the reason they don't schedule classes on Friday.
By 11:30, there's a line of at least a dozen undergrads--mostly greek--sighing in line outside the door, ID and wallet in hand and just waiting to get inside and hear some Nelly. They already ordered in for dinner but need this Club PariZäde Thursday, the reliable weekly release of grinding on the dining room-cum-dance floor, of being 'cool' enough to get into the back room (well, all the girls are allowed in) and of being crafty enough to slide themselves past the crowd at the bar.
Somewhere amid all this is Giorgio Bakatsias, shaking a few hands and then watching his masterpiece unfold in synced-up transition like a film director in the back row on premiere night. He knows that this is the scene and the only place to go tonight, and he knows that his dream has come true. But it's no sweat for him, because he's been wining them, dining them and then letting them celebrate until closing times for almost 20 years now--using a few tricks from the Old Country and making up a few of his own,. And almost never failing.
"I was always in favor of one space, where you don't have to go anywhere or you can convert a place from one to the next and still be acceptable," the restaurateur says of the mystique that is PariZäde, and then, with a smile: "In business, I guess it's called maximizing your space."
When he was 12, little Giorgio left his small hometown of Karista, Greece, its humble means and his little donkey behind with his sister and mother, bound for western North Carolina, where his father and two brothers had already introduced themselves to American life in New Bern, a town known for little else than being the birthplace of Pepsi. The Bakatsias family soon moved closer to Durham and made their home in Burlington--all six of them living above a small diner--cramming into a small apartment at night and working downstairs by day.
At the diner, the booths full of all different sorts of new people, the jukeboxes blaring all different sorts of new music and the fancy cars outside exemplifying a whole new way of life introduced Giorgio to America. And though he credits his parents with teaching him about hospitality, vision, passion and endurance, little Giorgio was learning English and finding his own creativity, and soon enough big George would be looking for something more.
"I was working in the restaurant from a very young age, washing dishes and busing. I didn't rebel to that, but I wanted to see another vision of the hospitality industry. At that point, of course, I was not exposed to it. I knew that I wanted something, but I did not totally know exactly what the pieces of the puzzle or what the vision was."
He started to put together the pieces when he saved up enough money to travel to Paris in his late teens. He did some partying, sure, but when he saw the exclusive restaurants and the fancy suits and a defined "scene," he knew what he wanted to bring back to his new home.
A family friend and doctor at Duke told George about the community and culture of Durham, so he set his sights on, of all things, a hot dog stand.
And so, in 1981, after annoying the hell out of a CCB banker, the 22-year-old George got a loan and another little piece of his American Dream. He began working to transform what used to be a chili and cheese dog joint into a new space with elegant Mediterranean cuisine. It took a while to get off the ground, but soon enough the restaurant market opened up. By the mid-80s, the power business class of Durham was packing the tables at Bakatsias Cuisine, his upscale restaurant in Loehmann's Plaza, eating goat cheese and rack of lamb instead of slaw and pulled pork. But eventually, he says, George felt suffocated, his creativity popping out of him just as it had at the diner. "At that time, I felt like I wanted to do more. It was just crazy madness, and then I wanted to create more fun places, more places where a suit and tie belong with a jean jacket--that kind of mixture of energy of young and old."
So then came Taverna Nikos and PariZäde (1990)... and George's Garage (1996), and way too many other places. He was bringing in wood-fire ovens to North Carolina and reveling in being the Wolfgang Puck of the South, but owning and operating a dozen restaurants caught up to him. His vision had made him not a visionary but a tax evader, and in 1991 the Internal Revenue Service hooked him for nonpayment of almost $100,000 and took two of his restaurants in Cary. It was the ultimate test of endurance for the marathon runner who had carried the Olympic torch in 1972 but who, 20 years later, had gotten off course.
"I had too many operations and not enough strong roots," he says. "I had to recycle again and have a more clear vision. But part of that growth the last few years is that I enjoyed the fact of having concentrated energy in this immediate walking circle." Indeed, he went from expanding his business throughout the region--his dining empire reaching from Durham to Cary to Chapel Hill to Greensboro and even back home to Burlington--to focusing his crosshairs on just a three-block radius.
Ever since, George has been fine-tuning an empire that has monopolized where Duke eats and, perhaps with even more dominance, where Duke socializes. "Vibrant, energy, fun" is how his company officially describes George's Garage, the heart of the Giorgio's Hospitality Group lineup, which currently oversees his six Durham-area restaurants. The fun comes out of being surrounded by kitchens, dining in the middle of George's creativity, whether it's putting together a four-star salad at the market for lunch, snapping into a lobster on a date or dancing on the tables Saturday night. All this in the heart of Ninth Street, which for many if not all of Duke students is as much of Durham as they'd like to see.
And when one of your only other high-dining options is right across the street at the half-indoor, half-outdoor "romance, charm, amour" of Vin Rouge, George is more or less your mayor. He'll schmooze with your grandparents and then give a Greek welcome to a greek semi-formal, because he knows that across the field behind the Erwin Square Apartments, P-zades is going strong and its new neighbor Verde is getting off to a solid start. You have no other choice but to do give into your mayor's monopoly.
"Not only do we have to have our events at his establishments, we also enjoy doing them there because of the variety and hospitality," says Kelley Giffin, social chair of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. "Due to the nature of the Duke social scene, we're forced to have parties off-campus, and George is really in tune with our needs."
For all the power he wields, then, George still enjoys spreading the "hospitality" he learned back in Burlington. Watching over the busy lunch-hour market at George's Garage from his modest office, a white chef's coat draped over his chair and a few salt and pepper packets strewn on a table, he can't stop smiling. His wrinkly cheeks gestate, exuding his energy and the fun he's having with his success. Then he slicks back his fading hair and his eyes burst open and ahead toward the vision that eventually molded George's circle of hospitality. For all the dreamy talk, though, he still thinks like a businessman, and when he looks you in the eyes that hard, it's tough to believe he can be this naive and this successful at the same time.
"I'm in this environment because predominantly of the Duke culture and its environment and its educated level that they bring to it," he says. "Whether it's from the cultural, the food, the entertainment part, it's a total approach for me. It's not segregated in a sense; otherwise I wouldn't be here. I'm able to bring some service because I can feel I can contribute to certain niches, whether it's different types of restaurants, different types of entertainment, different venues for the students.... That's good that people can enjoy the balance of working and being focused at school and being able to entertain and socialize. To me, I look at it as a blessing to be able to balance."
He's taken the old European style of eating and entertaining all night to Miami and, recently, to Chapel Hill in the form of Spice Street, a monstrous venue that's brought him full circle with booming financial success. But even back in Durham, where he drives a nice car but walks from George's Garage to Verde and PariZäde, and back again, he may know he's mastered the Duke scene and the American Dream and the restaurant business, but even the mayor can't forget how he got elected. "The appreciating level of what I have now and being grateful for it, it's important to have that certain standard for working, of attaining and appreciating," he says, remembering the donkey in Greece and the diner in Burlington while imagining the expansion of his empire. "But not going up too much.... It's more about appreciating what you're able to attain, whether it's a billion dollars or a million dollars. Whatever your goal is and you attain it, it's a great thing. So that's a joy--of having what you vision.
"What if you didn't dream?"
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