All the Right Moves

Bartending School helps restaurateur with business plans
DAVID CHILTON - Toronto Sun

Jimmy Mavrakakis knows how to move. He should do. He graduated from the University of Toronto in 1998 with a degree in kinesiology, the scientific study of human movement. But Mavrakakis’ best moves haven’t been as a physiotherapist or chiropractor, the two professions he was considering as careers, they’ve come in the world of hospitality.

These days, with partners Steve Xanthopoulos and Bill Vomvolakis, Mavrakakis is the owner of The Firehall Pizza Co. restaurant in The Village at Blue Mountain in Collingwood, Ont. The partners have plans for another Mediterranean-style restaurant in Blue Mountain, and have an eye on expansion into the GTA and Mont Tremblant, Que. Mavrakakis pegs some of his success on the training he received at the Bartending School of Ontario in Toronto. Although he had been tending bar for two years before taking the course, Mavrakakis says he still learned plenty during the four consecutive weekends he attended classes. There was the usual stuff of customer service and mixing drinks, but there was also lots to learn from the others studying alongside him.

“In the classes you had people who were my age at the time, which was mid-20s, with a 40- or a 60- year-old woman who wanted to learn to bartend because she was sick and tired of an office job. It was just a whole cross-section of people that you deal with every day.”

Mavrakakis has been the hospitality business a long time. He’s now 30 and started working in his parents’ restaurant along Toronto’s Danforth Avenue when he was 15. Later he moved over to an uncle’s pizza pub, also in Toronto, and that, he says, brought him into the business. Mavrakakis maintains that connection while working on his and his partners’ expansion plans.

The Firehall Pizza Co. is a family-oriented place and, not surprisingly, decorated like a firehall and filled with firefighting paraphernalia. It was the fourth restaurant opened in the new development, says Mavrakakis, and is doing very well. It opened in 2003. It seats 100 patrons during the winter and 240 when the patio is open in the summer.

“There was a great opportunity up there. It was under development, being so close to the ski hill. We have the best of the summer, we have the best of the winter,” Mavrakakis says.

The Village at Blue Mountain is a copy of a typical old Ontario village, he explains. The buildings in the development are new but are decorated to look old and weathered. Along with the local school and other typical rural dwellings, each of these old Ontario villages had a firehall — and so has The Village at Blue Mountain, although this one serves up pizza rather than pumps and hoses and cold water.

Mavrakakis and his partners are keen to bring the firehall concept — which is their own rather than a franchise — to the Toronto area, but first they have to oversee the opening of their new restaurant this fall, which will be a Mediterranean-style rather than a specifically Greek restaurant.

So, kinesiology’s loss — and perhaps physiotherapy’s and chiropractic’s too — is hospitality’s gain. Mavrakakis, thanks to his family background, classes at the Bartending School of Ontario and hard work is showing he has all the necessary moves.