Georgianna Hiliadaki and Nikos Roussos are the pair behind Funky Gourmet in Athens, which is where they were when I spoke with them for The Luxury of Attention. The book’s roll call notes that Funky Gourmet closed in 2019 and that their group now runs ventures including OPSO in London.
They appear in Chapter 10, The Recovery, and their contribution is to fold the recovery posture back into the craft itself. Most of the chapter is about what happens between a property and a guest when something goes wrong: the correction, the apology, the moment a guest expected to become a case number and instead found a person paying attention. Hiliadaki and Roussos describe what happens inside the kitchen before any of that, in how a chef receives criticism at all. It is the nature of the job, they told me, to be under constant criticism, and the chef always has to filter that criticism before internalizing it.
“You need to be able to analyze where it’s coming from, whether it’s genuine or not, and you must also ask yourself what, if anything, went wrong.” Georgianna Hiliadaki and Nikos Roussos, chefs, Funky Gourmet, Athens
Filtering, as they describe it, is analysis, and those questions keep a kitchen from two opposite failures, taking every complaint to heart and dismissing all of them. Only once the criticism has passed through that filter does it become something a team can act on.
“In the end, our mistakes are our best friends, since they make us better in what we do.” Georgianna Hiliadaki and Nikos Roussos, chefs, Funky Gourmet, Athens
I found that line useful because of what it removes. A kitchen that treats the mistake as a friend has taken the panic out of recovery, and a recovery without panic is the only kind a guest experiences as care rather than scramble. The discipline they describe lets a team look at a failure directly, fix it and improve, without the fear that makes people hide mistakes in the first place. It is the same discipline the hoteliers in the chapter describe from the front desk and the dining room, stated from the pass.
In the book, Georgianna Hiliadaki and Nikos Roussos appear in Chapter 10, The Recovery, on filtering criticism before internalizing it and on mistakes as the kitchen’s best teachers.