It’s about more than the sauce

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/12/2019 (2146 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For a spell in the early 1990s, popular Winnipeg pizza chain Santa Lucia ran an annual, December promotion during which they doled out Santa bucks, dollar-size slips of paper printed in a variety of denominations that customers could apply towards food purchases in the new year, when their holiday bills started to roll in.

Well, here’s some good tidings for those of you strapped for cash in the days leading up to Christmas. Some 25 years after the last ducats were issued, Greg Simeonidis and his sister Natasa Simeonidis, owners of the Santa Lucia restaurant at 4 St. Mary’s Rd., still happily redeem their old, in-house currency at par, in the event anybody reading this has a few, wrinkled Santa bucks burning a hole in their pocket.

“A couple came in last year and we accepted them,” says Trisha Burch, Santa Lucia’s marketing and communications director. “But other than that we haven’t seen any in a decade.”

It’s been 45 years since Santa Lucia, arguably the second-busiest Santa this time of year (on Friday night, the St. Mary’s location alone had 22 delivery drivers report for duty), celebrated its first Christmas in Winnipeg. Except the story of the company, which has since expanded to Morris, Brandon and Saskatoon, actually begins in 1957.

That was the year Greg and Natasa’s mother Valentina moved to Winnipeg to live with her sister and brother-in-law, both of whom had immigrated to Canada from their native Greece three years earlier. “Our dad Lazaros joined our mom a year later, in ‘58, and over the next several years, he brought his five brothers over, too, one at a time,” says Greg Simeonidis, seated in a booth in his restaurant’s lounge area.

His parents’ original idea was to remain in Winnipeg until all Lazaros’s siblings were established here, at which point the two of them would return to their picturesque home village, nestled in the mountains on the outskirts of Drama.

“But then my sister came along, then me, and I guess their plans changed,” says the father of two with a chuckle. Simeonidis, 55, describes his uncles as “bulls… built like tanks.”

After helping construct CNR’s Symington Yard in the early 1960s, all four moved to Thompson to work in the mines, leaving Lazaros, a mechanical draftsman, behind in Winnipeg. While still in Thompson, in 1971, an Italian fellow who worked alongside Greg’s uncle, George, announced that not only was he quitting his job to return to Montreal, he was also selling his side business, a take-out pizza outlet.

Although George knew zip about cooking, his wife, Silvia, did. A few weeks later, they became the owners of Santa Lucia Pizzeria. The revamped Santa Lucia was an instant hit, Simeondis says, primarily because the pizzas coming out of the oven didn’t look or taste like anything else that was being offered in the province at the time. In 1971, thin crust pizza, the type served at places such as Gondola and Pizza Place, was the norm. Except George Simeonidis wasn’t a big fan, convinced nobody would ever feel like they’d had enough to eat after ordering one.

“So he went to my aunt Silvia and asked her to fix it,” Simeonidis continues. “Overnight, she came up with a crust that — not a word of a lie — was twice as thick as what we serve nowadays. And because the crust was so thick, they had to add more toppings to balance things out. Eventually, they were doing such good business that by 1973, just two years later, they announced to the rest of the family they’d made enough money to retire, and were returning to Greece.”

That probably would have been the end of the Santa Lucia story, Simeonidis says, if not for the fact that after his aunt and uncle moved back to Europe, they spent the bulk of their savings in no time flat. A year later, in 1974, they told Lazaros they were coming back to Canada, this time to open a restaurant in Winnipeg.

“To make a long story short, my dad and Uncle George opened Winnipeg’s first Santa Lucia on Waterloo Street in River Heights. In 1980, by which time all the brothers had left Thompson to open stores of their own in Winnipeg, there were also Santa Lucias on Main Street, Pembina Highway, Portage Avenue plus my family’s on St. Mary’s Road, which I took over from my dad in 1993,” he says.

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Besides being the first pizza restaurant in Winnipeg to offer thick crust pies, Santa Lucia was also the first to serve what has since become a staple menu item at every pizza joint in town.

After their Waterloo locale opened, George and Lazaros would typically take their break at two or three in the afternoon, once the lunch crowd had dissipated. Their wives, the main cooks there, usually prepared a flatbread lathered with garlic butter and Greek dressing for them, with feta cheese, tomatoes and olives, occasionally shredded chicken, sprinkled on top.

“Every once in a while there would be a few sales people hanging around and because my mom and aunt never wanted anybody to go hungry, they’d bring them some of what they’d made for my dad and uncle, too,” Simeonidis says.

You can probably guess what happened next: before long, those same sales types were dropping by for lunch or dinner with their own family, at which point they’d yell in the direction of the kitchen, “Hey in there, can you make us one of your Greek specials?”

“I’m not saying we invented the Greek pizza — there were a few places that were already doing something similar with a red sauce — but we were definitely the first to do it with garlic butter and (olive) oil as the base,” Simeonidis says with a hint of pride.

Another accomplishment: in the mid-1980s, Santa Lucia boasted in its ads that its 18-inch pizza was the largest in the city. That was true, Simeonidis says, until a competitor introduced a 19-inch pie, followed by a 20-incher, followed by Pizza Hut, which, soon after the American conglomerate established its first store in Winnipeg, rolled out a 24-inch party pizza.

“I remember one of my uncles, I think it was Archie, saying he was tired of all this back-and-forth and how he was going to end it once and for all by coming out with a 30-inch pizza, which, in those days, was the largest you could possibly make as the door to the pizza oven was only 32 inches wide,” Simeonidis says.

He accomplished the feat, his nephew says, only there were a few problems. First of all, none of the box makers in Winnipeg made a take-out container large enough to house a 30-inch pie, so Lazaros and Greg’s uncle had to fork out $1,200 to have a custom die cut box built. Second, the insulated pizza bags Santa Lucia was using to keep its products warm during the delivery stage were too small to hold a 30-incher, so Simeonidis, in his 20s at the time, helped his mother and aunt cut sleeping bags in half, before sewing them back together to make proper-size carry-out bags.

“The other thing was most of the homes in the older parts of Winnipeg have front doors that are only 28 inches wide,” he says. “So it was a bit of struggle, at times, to get the pizza into a customer’s house without tipping the box from side to side. I remember when we first put a 30-inch pizza on the menu, if people said they were picking it up, we asked them what kind of car they drove. If it was a van or hatchback, they were OK, but if it was a smaller model, we let them know they were probably going to have to take their pizza home in the trunk.”

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Today, Simeonidis’s 200-seat restaurant, a gold-painted, palatial premises at the foot of the Norwood Bridge that was completely revamped 10 years ago, top to bottom, is without a doubt Santa Lucia’s flagship location. He and his sister employ close to 150 staff, a good chunk of whom report for work as early as 8 a.m. to begin preparing the dozens of large catering orders — not just pizza, but also lasagna, ravioli, souvlaki and moussaka — the kitchen turns out on a daily basis.

What’s interesting is if you meet Simeonidis for the first time in a social setting and ask him what he does for a living, his response might not be what you’d expect from a person whose family’s pies annually top consumer polls about the best pizza in town.

There was a two or three-year window in the early 1980s, he says, when only one Santa Lucia in the city, his dad’s, was owned by a member of the family. His dad’s brothers had sold their locations to outside interests when each in turn moved back to Greece for a few years, but one by one, reacquired each location upon their return to Canada.

“I grew up in Fort Garry, not too far from the Pembina Highway Santa Lucia, which, before we bought it back, didn’t have the greatest reputation,” Simeonidis says, recalling how his father would grimace whenever somebody informed him one of the other Santa Lucias had begun serving something like hotdogs.

“When I was 17 or 18, people I didn’t know would ask where I worked and I’d tell them ‘a restaurant.’ When they asked which one, I’d say ‘just a small place, you’ve probably haven’t heard of it,’ because I didn’t want to say Santa Lucia, in case they’d had a crap pizza from a store that wasn’t ours.”

To this day, he answers the question, “Where do you work?” pretty much the same way, rarely uttering the words “Santa Lucia” until pressed. Not that he should lose sleep worrying how people are going to react any longer, he admits.

“No, when I finally get around to telling them what restaurant I’m at, they’re usually like, ‘Santa Lucia? That’s our favourite pizza in the city.’ Hey, after 45 years in business, that’s something you never get tired of hearing.”

David Sanderson writes about Winnipeg-centric restaurants and businesses.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca