Fresh Take: Dining With The Head Of One Of The World’s Most Powerful Restaurant Empires

In my latest feature, I tell the story of how Costas Spiliadis, the 78-year-old founder of Estiatorio Milos, immigrated from Greece and expanded a small restaurant in Montreal into an iconic New York seafood restaurant—as well as 10 others spanning from Las Vegas to Dubai. Four more, including in Palm Beach and Toronto, are nearly open.

The profile is set during a lunch interview I had with Spiliadis a few weeks ago at his restaurant on 55th Street in Midtown Manhattan. We talked numbers and Milos’ future over a melange of the restaurant’s greatest hits, including classic feta-topped horiatiki salad and tzatziki hidden under a pile of zucchini chips.

Spiliadis’ restaurant group is one of the most powerful family-owned firms in luxury hospitality. The Milos business is 100% owned by Spiliadis and his kin and, in an era when outside funding is pouring into the industry to replicate popular restaurants around the world, Spiliadis is charting growth on his own terms.

Thanks to sparing no cost on the fish it buys, or the market prices it is willing to charge its customers (which can often tick up past $100 for a plate of whole grilled fish), Milos retains more profits than most high-end restaurants. All of that profit helps Spiliadis reinvest, but how he actually expands is critical. Each new location threatens the reputation of what Spiliadis has taken five decades to build.

“Using cash flow to build new restaurants is a slower process, but it’s more solid,” says Spiliadis. “We control the character of our restaurants. That would be my biggest nightmare: to go to one of my restaurants and not recognize my soul there.”

— Chloe Sorvino, Staff Writer

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Order my book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, out now from Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books.

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Field Notes

The grilled octopus at Milos on 55th Street in New York City is a favorite among regulars.

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Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer on the enterprise team at Forbes. Her book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, published on December 6, 2022, with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Her nearly nine years of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in northern France.