James Bill “Jimmy” Koikos, a beloved restaurateur who devoted nearly 60 years of his life to running Bessemer’s iconic Bright Star restaurant, has died.
Mr. Koikos died today after a seven-month battle with cancer, family members confirmed today. He lived to be 81.
“It’s a time for joy, not a time for sorrow,” Mr. Koikos said in an interview a few months before his death. “I’ve been a blessed guy.”
Mr. Koikos was born and raised in Bessemer, and after attending the University of Alabama, he came home to manage the Bright Star with his father, Bill Koikos, in 1960.
Nine years later, Mr. Koikos’ younger brother, Nicky Koikos, joined him at the restaurant, and the two brothers worked side-by-side as owner-operators of the Bright Star until Mr. Koikos’ death.
“He was my backbone,” Mr. Koikos said of his younger brother. “I had a lot of good friends, but my best friend was my brother. And we were good together.”
While the Koikos brothers may have been a pair, Nicky Koikos said his older brother was definitely the star.
“He’s the heart and soul of the restaurant, and it’s going to be hard to replace that,” Nicky Koikos said. “He’s been the heart and soul of the restaurant for 60 years.
“I’m losing my best friend, too,” he added. ”He lived to be 81, but it’s still sad. It’s really hard to give him up."
Jimmy Koikos, right, and his brother, Nicky Koikos, left, are pictured here with their father, Bill Koikos, who became an owner of the Bright Star in 1924. Fifty years later, in 1974, he transferred ownership of the restaurant to his two sons. (Photo courtesy of the Koikos Family)Photo courtesy of the Koikos Family
‘A mop that was bigger than I was’
The second of Vassilios "Bill" Koikos and Anastasia "Tasia" Koikos' three children, Mr. Koikos weighed just three pounds when he was born two months premature on April 21, 1938.
“It was something of a miracle that he survived,” Mr. Koikos’ older sister, Helen Koikos Cocoris, recalled in the 2007 book “A Centennial Celebration of The Bright Star Restaurant."
The Koikos family lived at 1452 Dartmouth Ave. in Bessemer, about a half-mile from the Bright Star, and Mr. Koikos started helping out around his family’s restaurant in 1952, when he was 14 years old.
"I'd get there in the morning and sweep the floor," he remembered in that same 2007 book. "Then I'd mop it with a mop that was bigger than I was."
Working after school and on weekends, Mr. Koikos earned $10 a week — $9.75 after deducting 25 cents for Social Security. His father let him keep $4.75 and made him save the rest in an account at the First Federal Bank next door to the restaurant.
"My dad taught me how to work and how to save money," Mr. Koikos said.
Mr. Koikos attended Arlington School and then Bessemer High School, where he played football for Euil “Snitz” Snider.
"I wasn't the biggest star of all," Mr. Koikos recalled. "(Snider) said, 'Damn it, Koikos, Greeks were good athletes. What the hell happened to you?'"
After he graduated from high school in 1957, Mr. Koikos enrolled at the University of Alabama, where he planned to study business administration.
In the fall of 1959, though, his college plans changed when his mother came to visit him in Tuscaloosa.
Mr. Koikos’ uncle, Pete Koikos, was retiring after nearly 50 years at the Bright Star, and Mr. Koikos’ mother told her oldest son that his father needed him to come back home.
“My mother came up to me and said, ‘You’re not the best student in the world,’” Mr. Koikos recalled. “I knew that I wasn’t going to be a college graduate, and I knew the Bright Star — I didn’t want it to be a failure.”
Mr. Koikos started working at the restaurant full-time on Jan. 1, 1960.
Several years later, just as his mother had done, Mr. Koikos went to Tuscaloosa to talk to his younger brother, Nicky, who was finishing his business degree at the University of Alabama, about coming home to join him at their family’s restaurant.
"I said, 'Nicky, what are you going to do when you get out of the University?'" Mr. Koikos recalled. "He said, 'Well, I hope to come work with you.'"
In 1969, Gus Sarris, who was a partner in the restaurant with Mr. Koikos' father, sold his interest in the Bright Star to Mr. Koikos, and five years after that, Bill Koikos transferred ownership to his sons Jimmy and Nicky.
Mr. Koikos ran the front of the restaurant, greeting and seating customers and making sure they were happy with their meal, and his brother ran the back of the house, managing the kitchen crew and the wait staff.
“Besides going to football games, we don’t have a lot of hobbies like golf or anything, so we just like being here," Nicky Koikos said.
“The Lord has let us keep on going because I’m not sure if we are the greatest restaurateurs, but (Jimmy) did have that passion for it.”
The 103 year old Bright Star, a landmark Bessemer restaurant, has been recognized as an American classic by Beard Awards. Jimmy Koikos makes his way through the bar. (The Birmingham News file) bn FTP Remote
'I'll do the best I can'
A couple of years before he died in 1988, Bill Koikos — or “Mr. Bill,” as his customers knew him — took his oldest son aside and reminded him how important the Bright Star is to their family.
"My daddy lived to be 94 years old," Mr. Koikos recalled in a 2010 interview with The Birmingham News. "When he was about 91 or 92, he said, 'This is a special place; I want you to take care of it.' So I said, 'Daddy, I'll do the best I can.'"
And Mr. Koikos did just that.
During the early 1980s, Mr. Koikos learned that a developer was planning to buy the Realty Building that had housed the Bright Star since 1915.
Fearful that he might lose the restaurant, Mr. Koikos convinced his landlord, Wallace Boothby, to sell it to him instead, ensuring the Bright Star's future for decades to come.
"I knew that this was my life," Mr. Koikos said. "If this (other) guy had bought the Realty Building, the Bright Star probably wouldn't be here today. I just told (the landlord), 'We've rented from you for years and years, my daddy always paid the rent on time, and if you give me first choice of buying the building, I would appreciate it.'
“When I bought the building, it didn’t just change my life, but it changed my business life,” Mr. Koikos added. “I knew that I could invest in this business, and it would be mine. And it was one of the best things that I ever did.”
The Koikos brothers gutted the building, installing a new elevator and renovating the lobby, and in 1984, they took over the retail space next to the restaurant and remodeled it to add two dining rooms, bringing the seating capacity to 345 guests.
In the late 1980s, Mr. Koikos developed a friendship with Jamie Shannon, then the head chef at the venerable New Orleans restaurant Commander’s Palace, and he encouraged Shannon to come cook at the Bright Star as part of a weekend celebration Mr. Koikos called “A Taste of New Orleans.”
Shannon died of cancer in 2001, but the New Orleans event, always a source of pride for Mr. Koikos, has remained an annual tradition at The Bright Star. About 1,800 guests attended this year’s event the first weekend in August.
In 2010, the James Beard Foundation honored the Bright Star with an America’s Classics Award, a distinction that goes to “restaurants with timeless appeal, beloved for quality food that reflects the character of their community.”
It was an especially proud moment for Mr. Koikos, whose father's cousin, Tom Bonduris, came here from Greece and started the Bright Star in 1907.
''Our family, we are just tickled to death,'' Mr. Koikos said in his humble, understated way before the 2010 James Beard Awards ceremony in New York City. ''It’s kind of something we never expected.''
Jimmy Koikos visits with actress Sandra Bullock and her father, John Bullock, when she treated him to Father's Day dinner at the Bright Star in 2010. John Bullock was a frequent guest at the restaurant. (Photo courtesy of the Koikos family)
'Mr. Bright Star'
In the latter years of his life, Mr. Koikos, who was married twice but never had children of his own, wanted to make sure that the Bright Star would be in good hands after he was gone.
He knew that his brother, Nicky, who is seven years his junior, would someday retire, and he wanted another family member to come work alongside their niece, Stacey Cocoris Craig, the Bright Star's business manager, and carry on the tradition.
On a trip to Toronto to say goodbye to his dying cousin Philip Anastassakis in the fall of 2009, Mr. Koikos talked to his cousin’s son, a young chef and restaurateur named Andreas Anastassakis, about moving to Bessemer and eventually taking over the Bright Star.
“I asked Andreas — this is exactly what I told him — I said, ‘My biggest regret in life was not having any children,’” Mr. Koikos recalled. “And I said, ‘Why don’t you and your fianceé think about coming to the Bright Star and maybe taking over one day?’”
Anastassakis was honored.
"This was the opportunity we had been waiting for, and we were ready for it," Anastassakis remembered. "My wife and I went home that night and she says to me, 'You think he's serious?' . . . . I said, 'Katie, he's never been more serious about anything in his life.'"
Before Mr. Koikos left to go back home the next day, Anastassakis called that morning to tell him something.
Mr. Koikos was afraid that Anastassakis had changed his mind.
"He said, 'Uncle Jimmy, (this is) Andreas,' and I thought, 'He's not coming'" Mr. Koikos recalled. "He said, 'I just want you to know, I won't let you down.'
"Chill bumps went all over me. I knew that we had somebody, and I could tell we had somebody special. And then (him) being in the family, it just doesn't get any better than that."
Anastassakis started working alongside Mr. Koikos at the Bright Star in February 2010, and it didn’t take him long to realize just how important the restaurant was to Mr. Koikos.
“It was an opportunity for him,” Anastassakis said. "It was his only opportunity, the way he looked at it. He went to college, and he knew college wasn’t for him. And his mother told him to go work at the Bright Star.
"In his mind, it was the only way for him to make it in life. And he did everything he had to do to make sure that he didn’t fail."
For guests at the Bright Star, no trip was complete unless Mr. Koikos stopped by their table to say hello and check on their food.
"He just had a magical way with people, just could make them feel good," Anastassakis said. "I think his passion for his restaurant, for his employees, for his guests, just bleeds through."
Mr. Koikos' presence was felt outside the restaurant, as well.
“It’s like anywhere he goes, the Bright Star goes with him,” Anastassakis said. “Jimmy and I will go places and people will come up and say, ‘Mr. Bright Star. I love your restaurant.’”
Former Alabama football coach Gene Stallings, left, visits with his old friend Jimmy Koikos at the Bright Star in Bessemer, Ala. Stallings says the Bright Star "My favorite restaurant in the whole world is the Bright Star," Stallings says. "If I could eat at one place in the world, it would be the Bright Star." (Photo courtesy of the Koikos family)
'An Alabama fan early, real early'
An Alabama football fan for as far back as he could remember, Mr. Koikos attended Paul "Bear" Bryant's first game as the head coach of the Crimson Tide, a 13-3 loss to eventual national champion LSU in Mobile in 1958, and he was there for Bryant's final game, a 21-15 victory over Illinois in the Liberty Bowl in 1982.
"I became an Alabama fan early, real early," Mr. Koikos said. "Not too many people can say they saw Coach Bryant's first game and his last game, in Memphis."
On his trips between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Bryant often visited the Bright Star, where Mr. Koikos reserved a private booth for the coach near the kitchen. Bryant often confided in Mr. Koikos.
“It was a real pleasure to talk to a man like that,” Mr. Koikos said in The Bright Star centennial book. “I came to understand that if you run a business the way he ran a football team, you’d have a pretty successful business.”
Gene Stallings, a protégé of Bryant's, became the head coach at Alabama in 1990, and one of the first places he visited after he got the job was the Bright Star.
He quickly became a fan of the restaurant and of Mr. Koikos.
“I love Jimmy Koikos,” Stallings said in an interview a few weeks before Mr. Koikos died. "He is an outstanding human being. He has been extremely kind and patient to my family.
"Whenever I'm in Alabama and I'm in that area, I try to stop at the Bright Star and visit with Jimmy," Stallings added. "The thing that always embarrassed me is that he never let me pay for a meal. I always tipped the waitresses well, but he never let me pay."
Mr. Koikos was a frequent guest at Alabama football practices over the years, and whenever he went, he always came with a box filled with a half-dozen or so of the Bright Star’s famous icebox pies for the coaches, their secretaries and some of the support staff.
Nick Saban, the current Crimson Tide head coach, is especially fond of the restaurant’s coconut pie. At one practice a couple of seasons ago, Mr. Koikos neglected to bring a pie for Saban, and the coach gave him some good-natured ribbing.
"He thought Coach was mad that he didn't bring him a pie," Anastassakis said. "We went home that night, and he got up at five o'clock in the morning, went to the Bright Star, got a pie and drove straight to Coach Saban's office and gave him a pie."
It was a measure of Mr. Koikos' devotion to Alabama football that when he first learned of his cancer in early April, he was more immediately concerned about missing Saban's annual party following the A-Day Game that weekend.
“He called me to his office and said, ‘I’ve got cancer,’” Anastassakis recalled. “He said, ‘Don’t tell anybody. I don’t want anyone stopping me from going to Coach Saban’s party.’ He said, ‘We’ll deal with this Monday.’”
Jimmy Koikos, seated, is presented an Alabama football jersey as Crimson Tide head football coach Nick Saban speaks at a ceremony dedicating the "grab 'n' go" section of the dining hall in the Mal M. Moore Athletic Facility in Mr. Koikos' honor on Sept. 18, 2019. (Photo courtesy of Connie Chwe)
‘A victory lap’
As word of Mr. Koikos' illness began to get around during the final months of his life, so did the outpouring of love and prayers.
"You wouldn't believe," Mr. Koikos said. "I've got a stack full of letters. I've got phone calls. . . .
“You know, you do some things for people, and you kind of forget that you did it,” he added. “And they write me letters, thanking me for doing this, thanking me for doing that. And sometimes, I don’t know these people.”
Among those who called Mr. Koikos was Joe Namath, the legendary Alabama and New York Jets quarterback. Namath has never been to the Bright Star, but he had met Mr. Koikos a few times at charity golf tournaments.
"I said, 'Joe, you don't know what this means to me,'" Mr. Koikos said.
In early August, about four months after Mr. Koikos learned that he was dying of cancer, Stallings invited Mr. Koikos to come spend the day with him on his ranch in Paris, Texas.
"He treated us like kings," Mr. Koikos said. "We spent a whole day. Ruth Ann (Stallings' wife) cooked a good meal for us, and he took us around in his golf cart."
Earlier this year, ROAR the Cure, a nonprofit group that raises money for the UAB Radiation Oncology department, announced that it would honor Mr. Koikos at its ninth annual ROAR James Bond Gala coming up in January.
At its annual kickoff party before the start of the 2019 football season, the Jefferson County Chapter of the University of Alabama Alumni Association honored Mr. Koikos for “his loyal and dedicated service to our chapter and to the university.”
And in September, the University of Alabama dedicated the “grab 'n’ go” section of the athletes’ dining hall in the Mal M. Moore Athletic Facility to Mr. Koikos. It was a surprise to Mr. Koikos who was also presented with an Alabama football jersey with “Koikos” and the number 1 on the back.
Former Alabama Athletics Director Bill Battle and his wife, Mary, donated the plaque honoring Mr. Koikos.
"He has done so much for the university," Battle said. "He's always loved the Crimson Tide, and he never asked any favors.
“I thought it was only fitting that when our players came into that dining hall, they saw Jimmy’s name up there.”
Phil and Denise Webb, friends of Mr. Koikos since tasting the Bright Star’s famous snapper throats 36 years ago, also dedicated a booth in the athletic dining facility in honor of Mr. Koikos.
Mr. Koikos also was an honorary member of the A-Club, the University of Alabama athletics letter-winners association, and a longtime member of the UA athletics booster organization the Red Elephant Club, which formerly met at the Bright Star.
An Alabama fan to the end, Mr. Koikos mustered the strength to attend one final Red Elephant Club meeting in late September.
"On the way home," Anastassakis recalled, "Jimmy said to me, 'Why couldn't I have just had a heart attack instead of having to go through all of this?'
"And I said, 'Jimmy, we have a lot of questions, but we don't have many answers. But in your case, I think the answer is, the Lord wanted to give you a victory lap.'"
Mr. Koikos smiled.
“You know, I’ve thought about that, but I’ve never had the guts to say it out loud,” he said. “But I think it’s true.”
Visitation for James Bill “Jimmy” Koikos will be from 4 to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 19, with the Trisagion service following at 7 p.m. at Holy Trinity-Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Cathedral, 307 19th St. South, Birmingham. Funeral will be at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Nov, 20, at the cathedral. A memorial meal will be served in the cathedral banquet hall following a graveside service at Elmwood Cemetery.