'I had to say thank you': How an Elgin restaurant owner became an inflation warrior
If you've been to the Big Skillet Restaurant & Pancake House in Elgin, chances are you've met George Arsoniadis. He's a memorable character.
Arsoniadis owns the Big Skillet, the kind of place your grandmother might refer to as her second kitchen. Breakfast all day, comfort food made from scratch for reasonable prices, and an owner who often sits at a table right by the door greeting people as they walk in. That is when he's not ambling about, chatting with his customers.
He'll be there waiting for his customers seven days a week.
Arsoniadis also is the Big Skillet's chief storyteller. He knows the names of his regulars, who make up about 80% of his customers. He talks of the "camaraderie" he has with his regulars, and how he wouldn't trade them "for all the tea in China."
"I love it. I'm 70 years old and I still want to do this until I die," he says, his back straightening just a little in a show of pride. "If I didn't like it, I would be gone in a New York minute."
But this story is about one man's fight against inflation, and we'll try to tell it as well as Arsoniadis does.
A pandemic story
This story starts, as so many do nowadays, with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Big Skillet was forced to close in the early days of the pandemic, eventually reopening with tents in the parking lot under which customers were served. Those tents cost the Big Skillet $11,000 a month, a huge expense. And Arsoniadis said he never cut an hour from his employees.
"I knew they had to feed their family," he says.
Still, Arsoniadis' regulars kept coming, often going out of their way to show up and keep the Big Skillet in business.
"When some of my customers heard (the cost of the tents), one of them looked at his wife and goes, 'Honey, this is your lucky day,'" Arsoniadis says, doing a solo version of the two-person conversation. "How's that?' 'You don't have to cook until Georgie is done with this (darn) pandemic. We're going to come here every day and we're going to keep him in business.'
"And they did. They did. Their friends did. Their friends' friends did. And we are still here. I had to say thank you to them."
There are, of course, many ways to say thank you. Arsoniadis, who bought the restaurant in 2017 and inherited most of his regulars, tried a few ways before he found the one that felt right.
"Before the pandemic I had very good and dedicated customers," he says, never bothering to take a glance at the notes his wife, Irene, gave him for our interview. "During the pandemic I had very good, dedicated customers. After the pandemic I continue to have very good, dedicated customers. And I thought it was my turn to say thank you for sticking with me and seeing the Big Skillet through thick and thin.
"But I didn't know what the (heck) to do. The prices kept going up. I couldn't give them a discount, I couldn't do this or I couldn't do that. Then, as god always does, He slapped me on the back of my head and said wake up, this is what you're going to do. You're going to become a tenacious individual, and you're going to talk to your vendors and you're going to let them know, enough is enough."
'Crazy, out of the box'
We told you Arsoniadis is a happy storyteller, a little colorful too, at least by the standards of this family newspaper. Here he gets a mischievous gleam in his eye as he describes how he "beat up" his suppliers, with whom he spends between $250,000 and $300,000 each per year.
Arsoniadis also is old school, which in this case means he meets with representatives from his suppliers a couple of times a week, in person, rather than ordering online. That worked to his advantage when god slapped him on the back of his head.
"It's crazy, it's out of the box, it's unorthodox, but I'm slashing my prices," Arsoniadis says he told his suppliers. "So what you're going to do is you're going to slash your prices that you sell to me and you're going to take it to your boss, to your boss' boss, to the man that's on top of the white tower and flies around in the Gulfstream jet, and you're going to tell him there's this little, short Greek out in Elgin that told us, either we lower our prices or he'll fire our (rear end)."
Those executives at our country's biggest food service companies? They listened to the little Elgin restaurant owner with the loyal customers.
"They all came back, especially one of them that said, 'I want to meet this little, short Greek and give him whatever we can do so he can lower his prices.' Because I told them, I want to say thank you to my customers. I can't do it by raising prices every two-to-three months," Arsoniadis says.
For example, he says, he used to pay his suppliers $2 a dozen for eggs. Now he pays 67 cents a dozen. Considering he orders 3,600 eggs a week, that adds up.
Marking up the markdowns
Only Arsoniadis didn't just tell customers he lowered prices, he showed them. Take a look at that photo by Daily Herald staff photographer Brian Hill, the photo of the Big Skillet's menu. At Irene's suggestion, Arsoniadis grabbed a menu and a red pen and started crossing out old prices and writing in new ones.
That cheezy bagel egg sandwich? $12.99 is crossed out, 11.99 written in next to it. He told you he's old school.
The gyro omelette went from $13.99 to $11.99, says so right there in red ink. He calls it a "villager's style of doing it." It looks like how your middle-school math teacher corrected your tests.
His customers, many of them retired and working class, tell Arsoniadis they appreciate his thank you. Actually, they don't just say it, they show their appreciation.
"Let's put it this way: The sales are better and higher now with lower prices than they were before with higher prices," Arsoniadis says. "The foot traffic is definitely much more than it was before. And it is more frequent."
Georgie Arsoniadis is a satisfied guy these days. He's got more people coming to visit him and his restaurant, and he feels better about the menu he slides in front of them.
We told you that little, short Greek out in Elgin tells a great story.