To keep Pete’s Kitchen afloat, Barakos signed the iconic diner up on the mobile food service app DoorDash. After a one-month hiatus, Pete’s reopened in April 2020 with limited hours. “My goal was to make sure that we were going to make it.” Upon arrival in Denver, Barakos moved in with his grandmother and got to work. “I’d been waiting for this moment,” he says. Anyone can come in.” The now 24-year-old moved from Arizona to Colorado two weeks before his graduation from Northern Arizona State University, where he studied hotel and restaurant management, to help save his family’s businesses. The spontaneity of it is the coolest thing. and the diner will fill up because of a concert down the street. “It could be a random Tuesday at 2:30 a.m. Before the pandemic, Barakos spent his summers taking orders at the Greek Town Cafe then heading over to Pete’s Kitchen to cook his favorite overnight shift. “When went, there was nobody really stepping up to steer the ship here,” says Alex Barakos, the Contos’ grandson. In spring 2020, still in the throes of grief, Liz braced for the COVID-19 pandemic solo without the husband’s leadership, and the doors of Pete’s Kitchen swiftly closed. At the end of 2019, in the span of five months, Pete’s Gyro Place and the Greek Town Cafe shuttered. In May 2019, Pete passed away at age 85, and the iconic Denver restaurateur left behind a legacy of Greek food, flare, and late-night eats at six different businesses across the city: the Satire Lounge, Pete’s Kitchen, Greek Town Cafe, Pete’s Central One, University Park Cafe, and Pete’s Gyro Place. The overnight shift at Pete’s Kitchen would come to be known as the graveyard shift. “We worked night shifts because, well, there are people that worked night shifts, and they would have no place to go eat,” Liz says. Since then, Liz and Pete worked to ensure the diner was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
When the diner was put on the market in 1981, the couple jumped at the opportunity to purchase a second business-and Pete’s Kitchen was born. Behind the Scenes of Yakitori Night at UncleĪfter getting off work late from the Satire Lounge, the Contos would meet their friends (who also worked late shifts) at the neighboring restaurant, which had been run as a diner since 1930.What to Buy at Bombay Bazaar, According to a Local Chef.Denver Native Set to Become the First Magician to Perform at Red Rocks.