First stop, Red Top Burger buffs show true colours in standing by St. Boniface bastion as it celebrates 65 years By: David Sanderson Posted: 12:00 PM CST Thursday, Mar. 6, 2025

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/03/2025 (551 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two summers ago, Stavros Athanasiadis was sporting a Winnipeg Blue Bombers T-shirt during a stroll through Kelowna, B.C., where he was vacationing with his wife Chelsea and their four children.

A passer-by called out “go Blue,” which caused Athanasiadis, never one to shy away from a friendly conversation, to stop in his tracks to chat with his fellow football fan.

The man stated he was from Winnipeg originally, but had headed west in the early 1970s. Upon learning Athanasiadis still lived in the city, he inquired as to his occupation.

“I told him I owned a restaurant, to which he said ‘oh, which one?’ The second I said the Red Top Drive Inn, you should have seen the look on his face,” Athanasiadis says, seated in a booth inside the 80-seat, ‘50s-style diner that is currently toasting its 65th year in operation.

The fellow explained that he graduated from Nelson McIntyre Collegiate, situated almost directly across the street from the Red Top, recognizable for its two-storey-tall Coca Cola mug as parking-lot sign.

In grades 11 and 12, he used to drop by for a bite on a near-daily basis, he remarked, and although it had been decades since his last meal there, he often found himself daydreaming about the Lot-O Burger — the Red Top’s take on a fatboy — accompanied by french fries smothered in gravy.

“What was interesting was how that wasn’t the first time I’d heard those sort of comments,” says Athanasiadis, who purchased the restaurant from the original owners, the Scourases, in January 2019.

“On many occasions, people will come in and tell us they no longer live (in Winnipeg), but how we were on their list of places to hit while they’re here visiting friends and family. I knew when I bought the Red Top that it had a loyal following, but what I didn’t know was how far that following extended.”

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The Red Top was established in 1960 by brothers Gus and John Scouras.

Gus and John, who immigrated to Winnipeg from Greece as teenagers in the early 1950s, were already running the city’s first Junior’s location out of a Main Street site presently occupied by VJ’s Drive Inn, when they were approached by a pair of St. Boniface businessmen.

The men were fans of Junior’s, and wanted the brothers to join them in converting a former lumberyard at 219 St. Mary’s Rd. into a full-service restaurant, to cash in on the drive-in craze that was sweeping across Canada and the United States at the time.

The Scourases, who bought out their partners in 1970, ran things together until Gus’s retirement in 1997. After John died unexpectedly in 2007 during a trip to Greece, his wife Vicky and son Peter took over.

Tragedy struck the family again 10 years later, when Peter died tragically at age 33, while vacationing in Costa Rica.

As difficult as it was emotionally, Vicky and her daughter Elena continued to run the Red Top, which serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, in the wake of Peter’s death. However, the writing was on the wall. Due to the fact Elena had a career of her own, and because Vicky was in her late 60s, they concluded it was time to part with the business.

Much like Gus and John Scouras, Athanasiadis, 52, came to Winnipeg from Greece as a young man. He was 20 years old and fresh out of the national army in September 1992 when he visited his older sister Donna, who had moved to Winnipeg years earlier after getting married.

Donna and her husband Paul Simeonidis were the proprietors of a popular Santa Lucia Pizza restaurant on Waterloo Street in River Heights, which Paul’s father had started in 1974. Athanasiadis was taught how to cook as part of his military training, so he offered to lend his sister and brother-in-law a hand when he wasn’t busy sightseeing.

“It was never my intention to remain in Canada — when I arrived, I couldn’t speak a word of English — but after a couple of weeks, I fell in love with the city and said to my sister, ‘I wonder if I can stay?’” Athanasiadis says.

After going through the proper channels, he returned to Winnipeg the following spring, this time for good. He worked for his sister and brother-in-law until 2010, at which point they sold him their business.

In the fall of 2018, Athanasiadis was approached by Vicky Scouras’s other son Demetris, whom he’d been friends with for years through soccer.

Demetris announced that his family would be selling the Red Top, but before they listed it on the open market, he wanted to know if Athanasiadis, a person he and his mother trusted would continue their restaurant’s legacy, was interested.

Of course, it’s an institution, Athanasiadis replied. But first he would have to run the idea past his wife.

“That night over dinner I said ‘how would you feel if we got involved with the Red Top?’ She told me she loved the restaurant, plus all the history that went along with it, but at the end of the day, we were already too busy with Santa Lucia. ‘I know we are,’ I agreed, but…”

Before assuming the reins, Athanasiadis reassured the Scourases he didn’t intend to change a thing — not the name, not the red-and-white exterior, not the wall of fame featuring headshots of famous types who’ve chowed down there through the years (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau! Professional wrestler Maurice “Mad Dog” Vachon!!), and certainly not the Monster Burger, a six-patty behemoth topped with cheese, mustard, chili sauce, onions, lettuce, tomatoes and dill pickle that has been a gut-busting staple there since Day 1.

“The funny thing is, it always seems to be the smaller guys who are able to finish it,” Athanasiadis says, shaking his head.

“Last week there was a guy in here who couldn’t have weighed more than 150 pounds, who, after downing a Monster Burger, fries and salad, finished his girlfriend’s leftovers, too.”

(Athanasiadis laughs, saying the most difficult part of the sale was acquiring the recipes for the Red Top’s time-tested chili and Greek salad dressing. Nothing had ever been written down; it had always been a case of “a dash of this and a spot of that,” so Vicky and her daughter were forced to spend time figuring out more precise measurements.)

Athanasiadis continues to be involved with his Santa Lucia outlet, which relocated to Corydon Avenue in 2014, but he spends the majority of his time at the Red Top, cooking, serving and greeting customers, many of whom have been sitting at the same table for as long as they can remember.

And although the Red Top is now officially a “senior citizen,” it continues to attract fresh customers on a near-daily basis, some drawn in by television repeats of the dining spot’s appearance 13 years ago on an episode of the Food Network’s You Gotta Eat Here.

“That and newcomers to Winnipeg. People move into the neighbourhood and stop by for breakfast or lunch, and make the comment that it looks like we’ve been here for a while.”

About that — a few nights ago, while getting ready for bed, Athanasiadis asked his eldest son, 11, what he wanted to be when he grows up. After listing professional hockey and/or soccer player, he declared he’d like to work at the Red Top.

“So long as it’s up to me, I’m going to be here for a long time to come, but it is comforting to know I might have somebody to turn things over to, to carry on the Red Top tradition for perhaps another 65 years, when I’m old and grey,” Athanasiadis says with a wink.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca