Hellenika Gold Coast: Chantay Logan reflects on popular Nobby Beach restaurant’s legacy

Hellenika is gone after founder Simon Gloftis made the decision to close. But it leaves behind a big fat legacy, writes Chantay Logan.

A DECADE has gone by since I first walked through the door of a single-storey, brick-lined building on the Gold Coast Highway.

I was on the clock, reviewing the new kid on the Nobby Beach block for this newspaper, but it felt like a family lunch. The kind where the conversation and the food never stops flowing.

Simon Gloftis was the indefatigable frontman then, as he is now, wearing a path between the kitchen and the guests he treated like old friends. As we now are.

‘HEAVY HEART’ AS HELLENIKA CLOSES ITS DOORS

Simon Gloftis

In a testament to its enduring appeal, the menu was much the same as Gold Coasters will experience today if they brave the M1 to dine at Brisbane’s The Calile … and we will.

Same rough-cut horiatiki salad loaded with tomatoes that always seemed to taste better than any I can get my hands on.

Same side-splittingly generous baked Junee lamb, slow-roasted so you could be seduced by smell alone.

Traditionalists who visited Hellenika in its infancy bemoaned the menu’s missing octopus, but Simon was just casting the net for worthy produce, rumoured to set him back a pulse-raising $28,000 as he worked to convince the South Australian suppliers that this gung-ho Gold Coaster meant business.

WHAT’S REPLACING HELLENIKA

Some of Hellenika’s incredible Octopus. Picture: Glenn Hampson

Simon’s mum, Krystina, made the galaktoboureko, a sticky-fingered, syrup-drizzled shortcut to heaven.

“No one can do it quite like her, and until they manage to, she’s happy to help,” he explained.

There’s a reason that meal, 10 long years ago, still sticks in my mind, but it wasn’t my first introduction to Simon’s hearty hospitality.

Back then he was a young gun on the caffeine scene, slinging cups at early ventures Little Beans Espresso, Three Beans Broadbeach and Piccolo at Miami.

I’ve since found out he doesn’t drink the stuff, although how he managed to launch three of Queensland’s most acclaimed venues in less than a year (Bar Hellenika, Hellenika at The Calile and Nineteen at The Star) without it eludes me.

Hellenika leaves behind a big legacy. Picture: Nigel Hallett

But Hellenika Nobby Beach won more hearts than it did awards.

Even if they hadn’t been home in a while, regulars knew they’d always have a place at the family table.

You got the sense of how special that huge, honorary Greek family really was when 500 or so of Simon’s nearest and dearest came together once a year for the longest, loudest and most love-filled of lunches at Miami Marketta.

The restaurant became a hotspot for celebrities and the Gold Coast’s powerbrokers, but everyone was treated equally. Everybody was somebody special to Simon.

“This was my dream,” he told me in that first review of Hellenika Nobby Beach, which concluded with some prophetic final words.

“We want to be around for a long time,” he said.

Simon Gloftis will focus on his Hellenika restaurant in Brisbane. Picture: NIGEL HALLETT

Opening Hellenika was a career-defining moment for our most successful restaurateur, but to appreciate how important it was for the Gold Coast, we need to revisit the culinary climate of a decade ago.

Remember when a restaurant was really good and we’d say it was “almost as good as one in Melbourne?” I was guilty of it, heralding Hellenika as “an apparition of city sophistication and culture”.

It’s not that the Gold Coast didn’t have worthy culinary contenders, but we tended to be bashful; good at keeping the secret from visitors easily distracted by shiny tourist traps.

Thanks to Simon and his counterparts, the tables were starting to turn. We were finding our feet and our confidence as a dining destination.

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Chantay Logan at Hellenika. Picture: Jerad Williams

When revered national food critic John Lethlean eventually plucked up the courage to visit Hellenika a couple of years into its operation, he didn’t sound that hopeful, describing our city as a “happy hunting ground for taco franchises and dodgy outlets promising authentic Thai/Japanese/Chinese/Indian/you-bloody-name-it experiences. Heading south, away from the big hotels and apartment towers, only suggests strip shopping hell, the unlikeliest of locations for a good restaurant. Yet here we are, at Nobby’s Beach …”

By the end of the meal, he was almost gushing: “The Greece-Melbourne connection is well documented, but I know of no place so delightful down south.”

We read that admission, along with the rest of Australia, and couldn’t help feeling smug.

The tables had turned.

Hellenika’s Nobby Beach closure is the end of an era, but it leaves one big, fat Greek legacy for the Gold Coast that we’ll continue to dine out on.