SFA | Projects | Birmingham Greek Oral Histories

The Bright Star, when it first opened up [at this location] in 1915, used to be open close to twenty-four hours a day. It was just people coming from mining towns[for] coffee, doughnuts, chili—whatever…Even when I was a child, [Bessemer] was so crowded that] people couldn’t walk the streets.
--Jimmy Koikos

Opened by Greek immigrant Tom Bonduris in 1907, The Bright Star is Alabama’s oldest restaurant still in operation. The restaurant has seen three other locations over the years, but The Bright Star has been in its current location in the mining town of Bessemer, just outside of Birmingham, since 1915. Bill and Pete Koikos (Tom Bonduris was their great-uncle) took over the restaurant in the 1920’s, and Bill’s sons, Jimmy And Nick Koikos, are still there, greeting regulars and overseeing the expansive menu that includes fresh fish, steak and some outstanding pie. The Bright Star’s Greek-style snapper and Trout Almondine are legendary, but you can also find a rare delicacy like snapper throats or the unusual pineapple cream cheese pie. The interior of the restaurant is true to its 1915 glory, with handpainted murals on the walls, a marble-tiled floor, and even a couple of private curtained booths—a tradition that, as it turns out, is not unique to Mississippi. The Bright Star will be celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2007, and you can bet there will be one heck of a celebration.

Edited Transcript

What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click this link. (Adobe Acrobat Reader required)

Subject: Jimmy Koikos, owner
Date: March 11, 2004 @ 9:00 a.m.
Location: The Bright Star
Interviewer: Amy Evans

Amy Evans:[T]his is Thursday, March eleventh, two thousand and four. And I’m in Bessemer at The Bright Star restaurant. And sir, if you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself and also, if you don’t mind, stating your age for the record here?

Jimmy Koikos: Okay.[Clears Throat] I’m Jimmy Koikos. K-O-I-K-O-S. Owner of The Bright Star restaurant. It’s been in business since 1907.

Okay, and your birthdate?

Birthday is fourth, twenty-first, thirty-eight.

------

yanni1 Um, and the restaurant was opened by Tom Bonduris, originally. Is—

Right.

--that correct?

Right, a great uncle of my dad’s [Bill Koikos].

Okay. And when did he [Mr. Bonduris] come to Birmingham from Greece?

He came to Birmingham in—in—in the—the history we got—in the late eighties. In the late eighteen—about eighteen eighty-s—eighty-eight or eighty-nine…He came to this country as a young thing. He—he worked as a waiter. And then he opened up a restaurant in Birmingham. And he called it The Bright Star, but it didn’t last long [phone rings in background]. And he heard about Bessemer being the young, mining, progressive town, so he came here and [announcement about a telephone call on the intercom] opened up The Bright Star a few—[second announcement] with a few years experience in a restaurant in 1907. And we are now—you are sitting in the fourth location of The Bright Star. I can show some pictures of how the first, second, third—And, uh—and The Bright Star has been in its present location [clears throat] since 1915.

Okay. Well, let me back up and ask you some more about, um, Mr. Bonduris. Do you know where in Greece he came from?

He came from it—it—it’s a place—same place my daddy [Bill Koikos] ca—came. In, uh, in—in the south—southwest part of Greece. A country town--[Clears throat] Excuse me. –called, in Greek, Peleta, Greece [Peleta is a neighboring town of Tsitalia, where many other Greeks now living in Birmingham came from. George Sarris, owner of the Fish Market Restaurant, is from Tsitalia, for example].

Okay.

Just a country town, or whatever. That’s the same place my daddy came from. My daddy came—you’ll probably ask me later—in 1920 to The Bright Star.

yanni1 Okay. And, um, Mr. Bonduris—do you know wh--if he came to Greece—I’m sorry, to Birmingham by himself? Or what brought him here?

He came—he had a brother that had come to—earlier--in New York. And so, we don’t know exactly why—of the history, but he came to Birmingham. There were Greek immigrants in the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, coming to America for a better opportunity…You know. Going—a lot of immigrants coming back then…Now, why he came to Birmingham, I don’t know. He—but he seemed like he—he brought his brothers—he brought my dad, and he just—a lot of people followed him from the same town.

Yeah. And your father, um, came quite a few years after—he had already been here.

Bright Star—my daddy came in 1920. He came straight to The Bright Star in 1920 and—until he passed away in 1988 at the age of ninety-four.

------

Can you talk about the size of The Bright Star at that time?

The size of The Bright Star is—you are sitting right now where it’s fifty [Mr. Koikos turns to point down the length of the part of the restaurant we are sitting in] by a hundred [feet].

Fifty by a hundred.

Yeah. That was the original 1915 Bright Star.

yanni1 And I understand that there was a horseshoe [shaped] bar in here somewhere.

It—it was a horse—c—it was a horseshoe bar in number one—Bright Star number one—and Bright Star number two…And there was a long bar that went over here [Mr. Koikos turns again to point down the length of the part of the restaurant o the back] all the way back to those private booths…These private booths—I’ll show you—are the orig—they’ve been here since 1915.

Have they really?

Yeah. Right. Of course.

Do you know how that…tradition started with the private booths?

Well, it’s just, uh—it just—somebody--somebody, uh, had told him that people had liked six or eight private—private booths back there in--in 1915. So he—he has four private booths.

------

And are these murals here that I’m looking at in this dining room-- [There are landscape murals above each booth in this dining room.]

These murals are been up there since 1915. They were painted by a European artist. He painted that first one with--I’ll cut the light here—with a guy fishing—

Okay.

--he painted it, and he painted in Brighton, Alabama, which is just up the street. He was kind of just—really, like a wino, but he had talent. So he painted that thing, and Mr. Bonduris liked it, so he painted all European thing. And then he painted these murals one by one—Put them up. Then they fed him and wined him and—and he just wandered on through. He never dreamed they’d be up here ninety years later.

------

yanni1 Okay. And so, um, how did the menu, um, come about for the restaurant? Do you have any idea?

Menus? Uh, we’ve got some nineteen twenties and thirties menus. Uh, but, uh, we understand that over there in the early nineteen tens there were, you know, uh—soup was a nickel, and, uh, you know, it included a drink and, uh—you know, uh, fif—ten or fifteen cents for—for hamburgers and, uh, chili. They had chili back then.

Okay. So it was a little more casual place than it is now.

Yeah. He had a little more casual place and then, when he built this, it was a really kind of an upscale restaurant with a marble—this--that’s a nineteen fifteen marble floor there.

And so when did the restaurant start being a steak and seafood restaurant?

It became a –it—a—it—it—it became a seafood restaurant and a steak restaurant in the nineteen—I would say, thirties. When we--they started getting fresh snapper. And it’s still a specialty today called “Bright Star’s Snapper Greek-Style.”

Okay.

Fresh snapper, broiled with a little oregano, olive oil, lemon juice and s--[sound Mr. Koikos’s hand hitting the microphone]—I mean, it’s still today one of the drawing cards, you know--

Okay.

--that we have.

Well, you say that you started that kind of menu style [staff member singing in background]—or that was started in the thirties. How did the stock market crash affect business?

The stock market crash—my daddy was here in 1929 when the stock market, uh, crashed. They could hardly pay their rent. Uh, they could, uh, just, you know—of course nobody was doing, uh--they, uh, even they said sometime they would just feed people. You know, they would feed people. And, uh, they didn’t know, uh—and going, of course, nobody was doing business. The stock market had crashed. The economy was zero. And, uh, they just, you know, made it from year to year until I—I—until the stock market was over and then, of course, Roosevelt got elected and things picked up in forty-five.

Okay.

And, yeah. Well—oh, he [Roosevelt] died in forty-five. And business picked up in the early thirties.

And what was the town of Bessemer like during those days?

The town of Bessemer was booming. The Bright Star, when it first opened up here in 1915, used to be open close to twenty-four hours a day. It was just people coming from mining towns—coffee, doughnuts, chili—and, uh, and whatever. And it—there—maybe about [short pause] I’ve heard of four-thirty or five [in the morning] they would clean up and get—get ready. And then there’d come breakfast and people going—there was about twenty-four—it was a—the towns were [phone rings in background]—on Friday and weekends or whatever—even when I was a child, you’d go just like--people couldn’t walk the streets, you know.

Uh-huh.

Going and just a real booming town.

------

And how did the name “The Bright Star” come about?

That’s a good question. We had done a lot of research on that. My sister is at—that’s—back in the late, uh, in the early nineteen hundreds, they were opening a lot of—lot of restaurants. Like—there—there was a restaurant called “Gold Star” in Birmingham. There was a restaurant called “Silver Star.” And there was a restaurant in, um, in Taladera [Talladega] called some kind of—they we’re named “star.” And so, Mr. Bonduris was—he was a very smart man. Not a very educ—no, he couldn’t get educated but smart and a good businessman. And he said—he looked--he said this restaurant is a “Bright Star.” And so, uh, he—he—you know, with a vision of, uh, nothing but a land of opportunity.

Um-hmm. Do you know what year that neon sign went up outside?

Yes, nineteen forty—forty-one. We’ve had the same neon sign there—

------

[A]nd so what was it like for you growing up in the restaurant business?

Well, I grew up, and I finished Bessemer High School down here—and thing, you know. And my daddy was—of course, he’d work and I’d come and I’d work and, you know, and pick up dishes and mop the floors, and he taught me to work. But—and I went to the University of Alabama and graduated and then—[sniffs] in 1960, um, my dad’s brother, Mr. Pete was here and kind of retired. And so he said are you—come in and—I said, “No, I’ll come in and work.” “But,” I said, “I don’t want—I don’t want to work in this business,” you know. Anyway, I came in and [sniffs]—and you know, started working and saw that, if you’re going to make any money from yourself, that you’ve got to go into business for yourself and not work for the other fella…So I got in it, and then my brother [Nick] graduated—Niki is with me now. He graduated the University in—in, um, sixty—sixty-seven, sixty-eight. And he came in—and so were both in here.

What did you all major in, uh, in college?

Business Administration.

Okay.

And accounting.

And so under your watch, what kind of changes have happened here at The Bright Star?

Oh! Golly, gosh, there’s lots. There’s been a lot—from minimum wage when it hardly wasn’t anything. From a dollar and a quarter to now. We’ve watched the Civil Rights transition of –of, uh—[sniffs] of, uh—you know, passing the Civil Rights Bill and, you know. Uh, getting minorities to, you know, come in and the little turmoil that was. Uh--

Was this always an integrated restaurant, or did some of those changes happen with the Civil Rights Act.

No, no. It wasn’t in—it wasn’t integrated in, uh—when--fifty-seven, fifty-eight. And, of course, when the [armed] service[s] started integrating, you know. People thought it would be—you know. It just passed over and today, of course, there’s not even a second thought about it. Uh, we’ve seen, uh, expansions. We’ve seen four different expansions here at the Bright Star.

------

There was a woman in here—I thought--it happened about a month ago. She was eating one Saturday. She said, “Are you the owner?” I said, “Yes, ma’am.” She said, “May I ask your last name?” I said, “Koikos.” She said, “I just want to know one thing: Is there going to be a Bright Star in Heaven?”

[Laughs]

“Because your place is juts so wonderful.” And that’s one of the nicest things that I’ve heard. So, we’re thinking about naming the book Bright Star in Heaven, you know. Which is, you know, we know a lot of history that has happened and, like I’ve told you, the changes we’ve made and, uh [snifs]—you know, we’ve spent a lot of money, but we’re here. Because [short pause], you know, we keep improving, you know.

------

It’s a—the restaurant is, uh--it—it’s popular, uh, people, uh, have got, you know, uh—like I told in another interview, uh, there’s a lot of respect for The Bright Star. Uh, we’ve had to fight location. We’re off the beaten path. People have to come down here to us. We—we in a –we’re in a city that was booming that is not exactly, you know, booming anymore, you know. Of course we’re not far from Hoover, [Highway] 150, we’re not far from the freeway and, um, I’m sure that if we had probably…We’d probably have a different location, we’d probably be but—we still average about five thousand people a week. Forty-eight, forty-nine hundred people a week. And, you know. And, uh—

How many people can you serve here at a time?

We serve—we seat about three hundred and fifty people.

Okay, and how many employees do you have?

Huh? Eighty-two. Seven days a week.

And I understand some of them have been with you for some time.

Oh, we’ve got some great people. We’ve got one girl, thirty-five years, and one twenty-seven years. One seventeen years. Uh, our chef’s been here twelve years. [Phone rings] The waitress is just—is off today, Ann, uh, twenty-three years.

My goodness.

And, uh, you know, that’s a success of the restaurant is to have people like that. We take a lot--pride in our people. We have a lot of meetings, you know, and talk to these people. And if--we’ve got a real good—people. Of course, we try to take care of them, you know, and whatever and go on. Because being open everyday it’s—it’s a tradition, you know, the—we’d like to probably close one day a week but—I guess we—It’s a tradition, you know. And me and my brother work very good together and, you know. He leaves and when he leaves, I go to work. And when I go somewhere, I go over there. So we have a—we have a nice working relationship, which means a lot. You know, a lot of restaurants don’t close up. Of course, they do in Bessemer. You know, a lot of restaurants close up because they can’t get along, you know. As you probably know that.

[H]ave you visited Greece?

Yes! Love it!

Do you visit often?

Uh, I’ve visited twice and plan to go back next August…This coming August. Yes, ma’am.

And do you visit your father’s hometown?

Yeah, I have—my—my—I’ve have slept in the house that my dad was born.

Really?

And everything. And so when—I’ve got some first cousins over there. One first cousin over there. I’ve got two first cousins and—three first cousins, all boys, [clears throat] in Tallahatchie, Florida…My—uh, dad and their dads were brothers. And we’re very close. And, uh, we keep up with each other. And, uh, so, you know. We go and, uh—of course, you know, good food over there too! [Laughs]

[Laughs] Do you speak Greek?

Yes.

Okay.

I—I don’t speak it the best, but when I go [clears throat]—like if you could—if you spoke Greek, I could probably carry on a conversation with you.

------

Um, and so you have a lot of things that are described as “Greek-style.”

Yeah.

And is that just the oregano and—

One of the—

--spices?

One of the most popular—popular steaks in—in the Birmingham area is the beef tenderloin Greek-style. It’s a--it’s beef—beef tenderloin, we split it, marinate it, and—and p—put a little olive oil a little, uh, Worcestershire sauce we make [phone rings] and we marinate it. [Phone rings] And we put it—and really, I don’t know if, um, if you’ve ever heard of it, but it was a real great restaurant in Montgomery, Alabama, called the Elite [Mr. Koikos pronounces this eee-lite]. It was a[n] excellent restaurant and it went and--everything--and it was in downtown Montgomery and all the leg—state legislators and—and that’s where we got [Mr. Koikos’s watch hits the table as he points to the menu] this—my dad was—was, uh, good friends with [unintelligible] was the name of it, and that’s where they split beef tenderloin steak. That’s one steak that I recommend everybody eat. Of course, your Greek snapper’s on there. The--the, uh, all—you got Trout Almondine, which is the—which is—which is on the lunch menu, uh, every day.

------

Okay. Well, do you have any, um, stories—great memories from your times here at The Bright Star? Some people who’ve passed through these doors?

Yeah. One time Vice President Barkley came in here in nineteen—he was Vice President under Harry Truman. They had a Bessemer corn and livestock festival. And, uh, he came, uh, probably in the late forties. And he came in here. [Sniffs] Of course, George Wallace has been here. Oh, Senator Shelby comes in here, of course. Uh, we have a lot of memories, uh, of—of different famous people, uh, coming in here. You had, uh—you had, uh—a hur--a tornado came through here and blew a sideline down and whatever, uh, that closed us for a few days. Well, you know, as you—as you said, we went through the Depression. And the—good times. Now, I think, we’re fighting [short pause] the [sound of employees sorting silverware], uh, chain outfits. There’s a new restaurant on every corner, you know.

------

Do you have anything that you’d like to add to the interview?

Well, uh, no. We’re just looking forward for our hundredth year anniversary. It kind of—it kind of just all of a sudden, you know, we started thinking about it and last--it’s—all of a sudden it’s—won’t be too long [and] it’ll be here, you know?

Sure.

Were excited about that. We’re, uh, we’re p—we’re probably--we are the onl—the oldest restaurant in the state of Alabama.

map

home | about the SFA | join us | contact