When Marco and Nick’s thoughts turned to providing home-cooked meals at Hill Street Grocer they did not look very far afield for a cook. “Will you cook for us?” they asked their mother Anastasia.

“We are happy because the customers like them, it’s all natural food because that’s how we were brought up,” said Anastasia. “The boys always liked Mum’s cooking, and we are happy because the customers like the dishes too.

“My grandparents had a vineyard and wheat and about 1000 goats. They had a lot of men working for them and you had to feed them. I used to help and I was interested in the way she was cooking – in big pots set on bricks, always with extra virgin olive oil, and everything came from out of the garden.”

One job Anastasia was not so pleased about was having to lay the table and serve a meal to Nikitas Nikitaras, before he went on his rounds making deliveries for the farm. “I did not want to do things for him. He would look at me and say `serve you right’,” she said.

But when 17-year-old Anastasia followed “the fashion” and came to Tasmania, where her uncle was living, “I realised how much I missed him.” By then Nikitas had to do his stint in the army and “we were waiting five years for one another”. Not only did Nikitas follow her to Australia, but eventually her parents, her sister Maria (Kalimnios) and a brother.

The couple owned a series of shops and the boys always worked in them. “From a young age, they started working very hard.”

After an excursion into bricklaying, Marco and his wife Dianna took over Hill Street Grocer (then known as Rite-Way West Hobart) from Dianna’s mother Irene. In the meantime, Nick had studied law at the University of Tasmania, where he met his wife Natalia, and they had forged corporate careers in Melbourne. Anastasia and Nikitas’s third son, Nektarios, also came to work at the shop and then Nick and Natalia returned from Melbourne in 2001 to join the family business.

“I feel it’s a blessing,” Anastasia says now all her family is working at the same enterprise.

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