Exit Strategy: Naughty Greek
Most owner-operated restaurants are not sold—they just close. Brand equity lies with the operators, who rarely even own the real estate the business occupies. When it’s time to move on, all they have to sell is a bunch of recipes and maybe a portion of a lease; rarely is that worth much to buyers. But now and then, lightning strikes. It takes scale, multiple profit centers, and luck.
Angelo Giovanis had decades in the medical device business. But he had grown up in Athens, Greece, where his parents owned restaurants. “I swore I’d never get into it,” he chuckles.
When he left medical devices in 2016 to “invest in myself,” Giovanis founded The Naughty Greek, which ultimately grew into two St. Paul locations and another in a Minneapolis skyway. “It was nostalgia to some extent,” he recalls. But also because, despite “two good, strong Greek churches,” he says, the Twin Cities had “no modern representation of Greek food.”
He self-funded, gave himself a year, and it paid off. The restaurants spun off a thriving catering operation and a grocery line of dips.
“My strategy was not to exit this soon.” But exit he did, selling to two young (but not Greek) entrepreneurs in June, who renamed the business Spicy Feta and put a Middle Eastern spin on it.
Only 47 at Naughty Greek’s birth in 2017, Giovanis did not plan to be seeking his exit after five years, wanting instead to “build a model that could be duplicated widely, perhaps franchised.” But the pandemic changed everything, shutting the restaurants repeatedly over 2020 and 2021. Catering, a core of profitability, fell to nothing because no one was holding Big Fat Greek Weddings.
“The straw that broke the camel’s back was people,” he explains. “Our industry lost so much good, young talent during Covid—who never came back. The industry lost its rock stars, future partners, and leaders. I found myself back in operations. I was exhausted.”
With aging parents in Greece and a thin bench in St. Paul, Giovanis began two years of rumination that ended with a decision to get out. He says he came out more than whole, which is more than many in the industry can say on the last day.
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“I’m not retiring. I’d love to advise others in the industry,” he says. “But I was a little bit naive. I would not go back and start another restaurant.”
