Hellenic hotshots Pandemic lockdown locked in success for restaurant voted city’s top Greek eatery six years running By: David Sanderson Posted: 2:26 PM CST Friday, Feb. 7, 2025

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/02/2025 (249 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Good luck netting a table at Helios, recently voted Winnipeg’s best Greek restaurant for the sixth year in a row by market-research firm Top Choice Awards.

Now, we’re not suggesting that Helios, which will toast its 10th anniversary later this year, is booked as much as four years in advance, like the Bank Tavern in Bristol, England. Nor does demand for a seat there compare to Noma, a three-Michelin star resto in Copenhagen that has a reported 20,000 people on its waiting list.

It’s just that since owner Nick Douklias ceased offering dine-in service in March 2020 to comply with provincial restrictions owing to COVID-19, Helios, located at 241 St. Mary’s Rd., hasn’t welcomed a single guest. Nil. Nada.

“I purposely keep the front blinds down, so as not to attract attention, plus there’s a large sign in the parking lot that reads ‘open for catering only.’ But it never fails; people still pull on the locked door almost daily, or call to make a reservation for 10,” Douklias says, seated across from a wall-mounted big-screen TV glued to a sports channel.

“I definitely miss interacting with all the people who used to come here like clockwork, to celebrate important moments in their lives. It’s just that during COVID we found something that works for us, and here we are, almost five years later, still going strong.”

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Douklias, 46, was born and raised in St. Boniface. Calling himself a Franco-Greek polyglot — his father Alex is originally from Greece and his mother Jeannine is French-Canadian — he says he was 11 years old when he was first bitten by the entrepreneurship bug.

At the time, his parents had traded in a pair of successful pizza joints — one in Gimli and a second in West Kildonan — for a high-end gift shop situated in a Marion Street strip mall. Douklias commonly hung out there on weekends, when he would engage with kids close to his age who’d been dragged there by their parents, and who, like himself, weren’t the least bit interested in glass dolls and porcelain tea sets.

One evening he mentioned to his father that it might be a good idea to stock some child-friendly merchandise. Tell you what, his father replied; he’d gather up a supply of Hot Wheels cars and G.I. Joe action figures, if Nick agreed to peddle them sidewalk-sale style, outside the front door.

“The first Saturday we did it, I sold out completely… my dad was like ‘holy cow’ when he opened the cash box,” Douklias says.

That initial success continued through the rest of the summer and when the first week of September rolled around, his parents scooped him up from school, telling him there was something they wanted him to see.

“The first Saturday we did it, I sold out completely… my dad was like ‘holy cow’ when he opened the cash box.”–Nick Douklias

“It turned out they’d rented a vacant space close to their store and had put up a big sign, Nick’s Nicknacks Discount Toys. There I was, an 11-year-old kid with my very own toy store. I thought I was the coolest guy ever.”

Douklias, a Collège Louis-Riel alumnus, had his sights set on a medical career, when he enrolled at the University of Manitoba in 1996. It turned out he was uncomfortable around “sick people,” resulting in a change of plans.

He graduated with a degree in psychology, instead, which led to a government position he remained at for a year or, as he puts it, “till it wasn’t fun any longer.”

He spent the next decade operating dollar stores in Winnipeg and Steinbach.

He enjoyed the day-to-day challenges but deep down, he wanted to be a restaurateur, he says, laughingly explaining that, as a person of Greek descent, “it’s in my DNA.”

(According to a story oft-repeated by his dad, Douklias was three years old when he marched into the kitchen of his parents’ maiden restaurant, and announced loudly “I wanna job!”)

He put out a few feelers and was rewarded in July 2015 when he learned the space housing La P’Tite France, a French restaurant on St. Mary’s Road, was hunting for a new tenant. The site, a five-minute drive from downtown, was perfect, he thought, and he was handed the keys in mid-August.

It had never taken him more than a week or two to open a new dollar store, so to his way of thinking, he and his dad, who joined him in the venture, would be welcoming customers to Helios — named for the Greek god of the sun — by Labour Day.

An outdated kitchen and a faulty gas line had other ideas. So while he waited for everything to be sorted out, he spent the next two-and-a-half months devising and perfecting a menu.

Douklias laughs, saying the first things most Winnipeggers think of when it comes to Greek locales are cheeseburgers and chili fries.

And although he is an admitted fan of Greek-run spots such as the Dairi-Wip Drive-In, he was determined Helios would offer authentic Greek cuisine only, based on recipes handed down from his dad’s side of the family.

“Souvlaki, dolmadakia, saganaki…” he says, counting off some of the house specialties on his fingers.

“I tell them we’re lucky in the sense that Greek food lends itself to catering — I mean, you’re never going to do this if you run a steakhouse, right?”–Nick Douklias

“Also, even though she’s French-Canadian, my mom makes the best yemista (a Greek-stuffed pepper) in the world, so we introduced that, too.”

Helios, which was open 365 days of the year, including Christmas and New Year’s Day, proved to be a hit from the get-go.

In fact, Douklias was enjoying one of his best months ever, sales-wise, in February 2020 when he began to hear rumblings of a fast-spreading, mysterious virus causing school closures and workplace shutdowns on the other side of the world.

“It was around March 15 when people here were starting to get nervous, too, and I specifically remember a customer coughing loudly in one corner of the room, and my servers getting anxious about taking his order,” Douklias says.

“‘I’ll take care of it, I have longer arms,’ I told them, but the writing was on the wall.”

The following afternoon, he and his dad were sitting across from each other after lunch. Before he could get the words out himself, his father announced that, to be on the safe side, it was best that they close.

Douklias can’t say enough good things about how the local community and Winnipeg as a whole supported their restaurant early in the pandemic.

The phones were ringing off the hook for pickup and delivery orders, plus Helios began providing take-and-bake options, whereby customers could grab fully-cooked frozen entrées to be heated up at home.

Helios had always offered catering, except, by the spring of 2021, Douklias and his father could hardly keep up with the number of requests they were receiving to feed guests at weddings, anniversary parties and corporate events.

It reached a point where individual orders from customers started getting in the way of large 200-person catering orders, he says, which was when he and his dad put their heads together again, and decided to concentrate on catering, exclusively.

“I’ve had the discussion with other restaurant owners who wonder how this business model even works,” he says.

“I tell them we’re lucky in the sense that Greek food lends itself to catering — I mean, you’re never going to do this if you run a steakhouse, right? — plus it eliminates all the headaches involved with staffing. Here, it’s just me and my dad.”

Never say never, Douklias replies, when asked whether Helios will ever return to the way things were during the first five years of its existence.

“I have that conversation with myself every day, because one of the great joys of running a restaurant is greeting and getting to know the people who support you. For the time being, though, I just feel incredibly lucky that we were able to get through the pandemic in our own way, when so many other restaurants didn’t survive.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca