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PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH MUSEUM OF HISTORY
of Iula Street and South Lumina Avenue. Robinson describes the
atmosphere of the Crystal Pier Restaurant as having nothing fancy
about it.
“Mother and I would go there for crab cakes when my dad would
go to Lion’s Club meetings and those were on Tuesdays,” Robinson
says. “I would also go up there and get their hot dogs; they were out
of this world.”
Along with the food, it was the man behind the counter, Spiro
Kefalas, who both Robinson and Dalton remember most.
“He came off the boat and they took him to the restaurant from
Greece around 1955,” Robinson says. “He didn’t speak much
English at all but he was a very charming, sweet man. He took to
American cooking really fast.”
After a tour in the Peace Corps, which took her through Greece
on the way back to Wrightsville Beach in 1969, Robinson remem-bers
the first time she tried authentic Greek cuisine.
“When I got home I went up to the pier to see Spiro and I said
to him, ‘Why don’t you serve these fabulous Greek foods I ate
while I was there?’” she says. “And he said, ‘Oh, Americans won’t
eat those.’ He never did, he kept serving those hot dogs and crab
cakes.”
While Robinson enjoyed Kefalas’ hot dogs, for Dalton it was
another bit of classic American fare that fueled many long hours
Clockwise from top: Crystal Pier
as viewed from the nearby Lewis
Apartments in the early 1960s.
Showing signs of age, a pile and
cross-bracing beams were ripped
from Crystal Pier in late August
2012 by strong surf generated by
Hurricane Isaac. Crystal Pier south
side in the mid 1970s.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALLISON POTTER
spent watching his line on the pier railing.
“I got a little bit older, was in high school and ate a lot of his
hamburger steaks … which had nothing to do with seafood,”
Dalton laughs. “Spiro would take care of me.”
Spiro Kefalas remained behind the lunch counter in 1974 when
Zezefellis sold the restaurant and pier to George and Nick Fokakis,
Zezefellis’ cousins.
In a Wilmington Star News article from June 14, 1976, Fokakis
and Kafalas seemed to have learned from their predecessor by the
way they “greeted nearly everyone in the small but constant stream
of patrons.”
“Watching Fokakis take an order, wipe sweat from his brow, ring
up an earlier order and push his glasses back up on the bridge of
his nose as a bikini-clad young lady walks in, you can tell the lunch
hour is the most hectic,” wrote author Charles Sneed. In response
to the question of whether he ever grew tired of looking at the
ladies’ bathing suits, Fokakis admitted, “I’m single … I get tired.
Spiro — he’s married. He doesn’t get tired.”
The familiar lunch counter atmosphere remained on the first
floor when the Fokakises tore down the building and built the
three-story replacement that stands today. Six years later the
brothers would sell the building and pier to Monica Watson,
who changed the eatery’s name to the Oceanic Restaurant.
www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF BILL CREASY