Restaurant business is all in the family for new owner of Elgin's Big Skillet
The new owner of Elgin's Big Skillet Restaurant & Pancake House says, "I feel like the new kid on the block."
His staff and many of his customers have been around a long time.
But George Arsoniadis will be familiar to many of those customers because he comes from 30 years of owning and/or managing such other local eateries as Alexander's, Uncle Paul's, Bootleggers, Joe's American Kitchen and Jameson's. And he is part of the same family that owns the Village Squire and Rookies.
Located along McLean Boulevard just north of Big Timber Road, the 4,500-square-foot Big Skillet was started 25 years ago as the Spring Garden Restaurant. Arsoniadis said it was renamed the Big Skillet nine years ago when a new operator, Jimmy Bozonelos, took over and wanted to emphasize its breakfast business, though "it has always offered breakfast, lunch and dinner."
Arsoniadis, who now can be found there 12 hours a day seven days a week, bought both the real estate and the business in February.
He said he was born in Greece 63 years ago and came to America when he was 12 years old.
"My family came to Elgin because my uncle and my cousins were in the restaurant business there already," he said.
Arsoniadis was asked why so many Elgin-area restaurants are owned by Greek-Americans.
"When a lot of Greeks came in the 1900s they couldn't speak English, so the only jobs available were manual labor or working as cooks and busboys in restaurants," he thinks. "Greeks know how to do one thing real good, which is to run restaurants. So we stuck to that."
At first, though, this Greek-American didn't think his own career would involve standing at a cash register and handing customers menus and wandering from table to table to converse with them. He earned an accounting degree from Southern Illinois University and "I expected that I would sit in an office and keep the books for restaurants. But then my uncles, George and Paul Karas, made me an offer I couldn't refuse - 'would you like to open a restaurant with us and have you as the operator?' The rest is history."
With the uncles' backing, in 1987 he opened Alexander's in a building where several other eateries had failed on Route 31 in Elgin. The trio named it after Alexander the Great, the ancient conquering hero of their home region of Macedonia.
Leaving Alexander's in the mid-'90s, Arsoniadis joined some cousins to start Uncle Paul's restaurant on Dundee Avenue in Elgin, named after their uncle, Paul Karas. Now in the hands of another owner, that is now named Baker Hill.
Working with the Jameson's Charhouse chain as a consultant and manager, Arsoniadis helped them start Joe's American Kitchen in the former TGI Friday's building at Spring Hill Mall, then helped them turn the former Walleye Grill at Sun City in Huntley into a Jameson's.
Most recently, with financial help from developer Tom Roeser and the village of West Dundee, he converted a long-empty restaurant along Route 31 in West Dundee into the Prohibition-themed Bootleggers Kitchen and Pub. But that closed less than a year after it opened in March 2015 and Arsoniadis said that "I have been disconnected from that since January 2016."
And now his project is the Big Skillet.
Arsoniadis said he plans "a lot of facelifting" to update the building, but the entire staff of 30 has stayed on and he plans no major changes in the menu. "We're known for our home-cooked meals and comfort food," he said. "Everything is made from scratch - homemade soups, homemade sauces, homemade meatloaf. And the breakfast skillets really are big. Jimmy Bozonelos said that a normal pancake order is three pancakes but we'll serve four.'"
Arsoniadis said the eatery has begun offering rotating specials at breakfast, lunch and dinner for $5.99, $7.99 and $9.99 respectively. And it will continue having a large senior citizens' menu plus a monthlong Oktoberfest with German food and an Irish Fest around St. Patrick's Day.
He said many of the customers he's been meeting have been coming for years.
"They will have their favorite booth and favorite server and will pick up their own menus. People feel like they're at home in their own kitchen. And a lot of customers know each other. I see three or four generations of a family coming in together, especially after church on Sunday."
• Big Skillet Restaurant and Pancake House is at 90 Tyler Creek Plaza, Elgin. It is open 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. Call (847) 741-7331.