At Athens Pizza and Pasta, it\u2019s a family affair \u2013 even if you\u2019re not blood-related.<\/p>\n
Operating on Auburn\u2019s Main Street since 1980, Athens has been an institution, offering Mediterranean dishes, which includes pizza, pasta, Greek salad and their famous foot-long hot oven grinders.<\/p>\n
The Reporter spoke with Yianni Contoravdis, a 29-year-old worker at Athens and the grandson of Anastasios \u201cTasso\u201d and Elefteria Tsantilas, the original owners of the beloved restaurant. Contoravdis grew up working in the restaurant, which is now owned by his father Bill, his uncle Tom, and his mother Nina, who handles social media .<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the best to be honest with you,\u201d Contoravdis said of growing up in the family business. \u201cYou have unlimited pizza, so as a kid that makes making friends pretty easy, so I had a great childhood. I worked in the restaurant growing up when I was in elementary school. I would just kind of help out on weekends, and then when I turned 13, that\u2019s when I started washing dishes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Contoravdis says that he considers working with his large family, which includes his grandparents as his grandmother Elefteria still makes the restaurant\u2019s meatballs by hand, as a blessing, adding that this appreciation extends to the Auburn community.<\/p>\n
\u201cAuburn is unique in many ways, but just [the community is] unbelievably supportive and what you put into the city is typically what you get out of it. We\u2019ve been around for 40 years, and it\u2019s because of the people are supporting us. It\u2019s not because our food is the best in the world, or anything like that, it\u2019s because we respect and appreciate our customers and are here to serve them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The food certainly has something to do with Athens\u2019 popularity: they have won many Best of Auburn awards, and when the restaurant hit hard times in 2020, people came out to continue buying their famous grinders.<\/p>\n
\u201cA prime example would be in 2020, the building had a fire and we were closed for 16 months and we were doing cold take-and-bake sandwiches and dinners that we had from a refrigerated box truck that we were gifted from Peterson,\u201d he said, adding that Zola\u2019s Caf\u00e9, Trotters and Auburn mayor Nancy Backus, who he says allowed Athens to use the kitchen in the Auburn Community Center for a discounted price.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember every single person that helped us, I remember the customers at the first take-and-bake we had. We prepared 100 grinders, and there was probably 150-200 people in line. Those grinders were gone by the fifth person, the 10th person. People were getting three, four, five of them at a time, and when we ran out of food, no one got mad, they just came, and they shared condolences. They gave us a hug, they said, \u2018Hey, we can\u2019t wait for you to get back on your feet. Let us know what we can do for you.\u2019 That\u2019s why I love working here because, we always say if it wasn\u2019t for Auburn, we wouldn\u2019t have been back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Athens has tremendous gratitude to the community and on Thursday, Nov. 26 they will be paying it forward with their 15th annual free Thanksgiving Day meal, where Athens Pizza and Pasta volunteers will offer packed meals on a first come, first serve basis. The event will run from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the restaurant\u2019s location at 959 East Main St.<\/p>\n
To learn more about the free Thanksgiving meal, the restaurant\u2019s menu and more, visit athenspizzaauburn.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At Athens Pizza and Pasta, it\u2019s a family affair \u2013 even if you\u2019re not blood-related. Operating on Auburn\u2019s Main Street since 1980, Athens has been an institution, offering Mediterranean dishes, which includes pizza, pasta, Greek salad and their famous foot-long hot oven grinders. The Reporter spoke with Yianni Contoravdis, a 29-year-old worker at Athens and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[260],"tags":[420,421],"class_list":["post-53499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mediterranean-restaurants","tag-mediterranean-restaurant","tag-mediterranean-restaurants"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@dnc\/117572700956605922","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/restaurants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}