Costas Spiliadis’ Milos hospitality kingdom has eleven restaurants from Miami to Dubai, along with yachts for charter and a boutique hotel in Greece. And he remains hungry for new ventures.
By Chloe Sorvino, Forbes Staff
It’s lunchtime in Midtown Manhattan, and Estiatorio Milos is bustling. Inside the modern Greek restaurant that opened in 1997, a stone well from Crete, circa 1700, greets guests and a cascade of whole fish, prawns and shellfish is displayed on a spotlighted mound of ice.
Emerging from the hum of business diners eating grilled octopus is Costas Spiliadis, the 78-year-old founder of this flagship and the restaurant empire behind it sits down at a white tablecloth-lined place setting and contemplates the freshest selection of the day.
Spiliadis begins to share the story of how he expanded the original Milos in Montreal into an iconic New York seafood restaurant, as well as ten others spanning from Las Vegas to Dubai. Four more, including in Palm Beach and Toronto, are nearly open. In Greece, Spiliadis owns a boutique hotel in Athens, as well as two yachts available for charter. Those businesses are only the start of how he has been diversifying his luxury hospitality portfolio.
“People give up earlier than necessary,” says Spiliadis, as a trio of raw fish crudo arrives at the table. “Give it that extra effort.”
Spiliadis’ Milos empire—named for the Greek Island he often visited, until it became too touristy—is now one of the most powerful family-owned firms in luxury hospitality. The business, 100% owned by Spiliadis and his kin, exceeds $100 million in annual revenue, and, in an era when outside funding is pouring into the industry to replicate popular restaurants around the world, Spiliadis is charting growth on his own terms.
Chef Nobu Matsuhisa’s 21 U.S. restaurants brought in sales of $190 million in 2023, according to Technomic, a Chicago-based food industry consultancy. New York-based Major Food Group, with more than 50 restaurants worldwide, including Carbone, is estimated to have as much as $500 million in annual sales. Unlike Milos, competitors had to secure big checks to grow into nine-figure businesses: Nobu, for example, has raised an estimated $100 million to expand.
Milos is also succeeding as high-end restaurant deals have been heating up: In 2022, The Howard Hughes Corporation acquired a minority stake in Jean Georges Restaurants for $55 million. In 2023 the billionaire Mark Scheinberg’s Mohari acquired The Tao Group in a $550 million leveraged buyout that valued the group (of 80 restaurants with $485 million in annual revenue) at $822 million. But Spiliadis keeps brushing off investors.
“We had a choice of either going the corporate way of growth, where we create a very strong corporate central office,” says Spiliadis. “Or, what I chose instead—the family model of growth, with all the pain that comes with it. Although it may put some limit to the pace of growth, at least you grow with less dangers of losing your identity, losing your character, and losing all you’re trying to build.
“Using cash flow to build new restaurants is a slower process, but it’s more solid,” Spiliadis continues. “We control the character of our restaurants. That would be my biggest nightmare: to go to one of my restaurants and not recognize my soul there.”
The odyssey of Milos began six decades ago. In 1965, with two suitcases filled with clothes and some vinyl records, a teenage Spiliadis left Patras, a port city in Western Greece near the ancient village of Olympia. He landed in New York City to attend New York University. Culture shock was tough, and he transferred in 1971 to Concordia University in Montreal, where he studied sociology. After graduating, he helped open a local radio station and hosted a daily news show for an audience of mostly recent immigrants. But it was hard to make money, and, after six years, Spiliadis decided to open a spot where his radio guests could eat or even perform live after coming on air.
He took out a $30,000 loan from a local bank in 1979 and became a restaurateur. He had never cooked professionally before. But he knew his mother’s recipes.
“I had nothing. I had no money. I had no experience. I had no knowledge of cooking,” says Spiliadis. “All I knew was how I enjoyed food at home. I had to learn how to run a restaurant the hard way, in an unforgiving market. It meant dedication. It meant persistence. It meant hard work and learning at the same time.”
With his first restaurant in Montreal, Spiliadis altered the concept to revolve around the freshest seafood he could secure each day. “I didn’t feel like Greek restaurants were representing the food and the culinary experience that I grew up with in my family,” he recalls. “Greek cuisine suffered a low image.”
The right ingredients, Spiliadis knew, would change that. But that meant he had to import a lot from Greece. He also had to start driving 750 miles roundtrip twice a week to New York City to buy seafood at the Fulton Fish Market. In 1980, Spiliadis convinced David Samuels, the owner of Blue Ribbon Fish Company, to work with him, even though the business did not supply restaurants. In return for the best available seafood, Spiliadis promised “to never ask the price of the fish.” And he paid in cash, well in advance—unheard of in an industry where its common to settle accounts 30 to 90 days after a delivery.
Later on, Samuels even tested Spiliadis’s pledge, and told him, “I can’t charge you enough to make it worth my while.” Spiliadis replied: “Yes, you can.”
“He understood better than me that people were willing to pay more,” Samuels says. “Overcharging him 30 or 40 cents a pound in my business is a lot of money. But in his business it meant nothing because his prices are that extraordinary. As expensive as it is, his clientele knows it’s great value. There’s no compromise.”
Because the seafood was super fresh, Milos never had a menu. “We’re not over manipulating the ingredients. We’re not changing the character of the ingredients,” says Spiliadis. “It gave guests power over the experience, instead of being passive receivers. Now they are the masters of the experience, as they should be.”
When some restaurateurs in New York began copying Milos’s market-style concept, Spiliadis doubled down. He didn’t lower prices as competitors undercut him. At the same time, Spiliadis was an exacting manager, hyper-focused on imperfections.
New York City is now Spiliadis’s crown jewel, and his success there has driven the expansion of Milos restaurants around the world. One way Spiliadis has maintained control is discipline in picking neighborhoods in the midst of change, where rent is cheaper. When Spiliadis opened up a hotel and restaurant in Athens in 2004, he chose a downtown neighborhood that had been neglected.
The strategy held true with his restaurant in Miami, where Spiliadis chose the southern tip of South Beach, which back in 2012 was not as developed, aside from Joe’s Stone Crab. A deal on buying or leasing his properties helped, but Spiliadis still had to take out loans to keep expanding. Before every expansion, Spiliadis heavily weighs the risk involved, according to Michael Stern, his financial advisor of 35 years. A favorite refrain to Stern is “Don’t take on more risk than I can afford.”
But Spiliadis wanted to keep growing, so he started bringing in some partners through license deals and joint ventures. He’s completed three licenses “very reluctantly” in Los Cabos, Mexico, Dubai and Singapore. He says he would have never agreed if his deals didn’t protect his control of two key aspects: firing and hiring, and the sourcing of ingredients. A joint venture in West Palm Beach, Florida and a self-funded operation in Toronto open this fall. In a year, a West Coast outpost in Los Angeles will open, and for his next locations, Spiliadis is looking as far as Tokyo, Paris, Italy and Mexico City.
The Catch: To charter ‘Milos at Sea’ for a week in Greece starts at $65,000 for up to 10 people.
Milos
As Spiliadis has focused on maintaining his business’ edge, he is further diversifying his hospitality portfolio beyond restaurants. Nobu, which translated its buzzy restaurants into a line of hotels in 2013, now has 41 global locations. Hotels have helped the Nobu business greatly, as they can be far more profitable than restaurants. Still, most need an eatery, which has helped Nobu’s restaurants grow to 56 worldwide. (Nobu declined to comment on its financials.)
Alongside Spiliadis’ boutique hotel in Athens, one of his most successful ventures is a small fleet docked at the port of Piraeus, just outside of the Greek capital. Dubbed Milos At Sea, his two yachts—a 113-footer (purchased in 2014) and a 57-footer (purchased in 2017)—offer Milos-level quality food and service in the middle of the Mediterranean. For a full week charter on the big boat, prices start at $65,000 for up to 10 people. The smaller one rents per day, at $3,500 for six. “We’re thinking of getting a couple of more boats,” he adds.
An island hotel or a beach club on the party-centric Greek island Mykonos could be next and Spiliadis says he even dreams of opening a luxury cooking school. Its potential location is Aroniadika on the island of Kythera, a 200-year-old village that was almost entirely abandoned and has since been getting slowly restored by Spiliadis, who purchased 20 properties surrounding its old town square.
Meanwhile, Spiliadis is also diversifying with a line of high-end pantry items that can bring the Milos experience home. (As other popular restaurants have been cashing-in to do, too: Over 2022 and 2023 Momofuku raised $26 million for its own grocery store brand.) From the island of Kythera, where Spiliadis owns a 24-acre estate, Spiliadis has been employing a team to hand-harvest sea salt and bottle wild honey. And five years ago he planted 2,000 olive trees there, so he’s now also making olive oil.
And Spiliadis has no intention of selling the Milos empire—he plans to leave it to his two children who work alongside him. His son George, 44, oversees the restaurants as chief business officer, while spearheading the Greek wines offered. His daughter Evridiki, 49, who had previously managed the family’s restaurant in Athens, is a photographer who doubles as the chief brand officer focused on marketing and restaurant design.
Says Spiliadis, who still cooks for his family, including his six grandchildren, nearly every Sunday from his home in Canada’s Quebec province: “We intend to keep it as a family business.”