Gardens of Salonica, the Greek restaurant that has anchored a corner of Northeast Minneapolis since 1991, is planning to close in 2027, bringing a 36-year chapter of the neighborhood's history to an end. Owner Anna Christoforides will be 70 when the doors finally shut, closing out a business that began as a scrappy vending operation and grew into one of the Twin Cities' most enduring Greek food institutions.
The story, as told to Racket, traces back to 1978, when Christoforides met her husband, Lazaros, in the Russian Department at the University of Minnesota while she was finishing an honors bachelor's degree in studio arts. He went on to earn a master's degree in mass communications, and the couple eventually built a life together that would center on food.
Before there was a restaurant, there was a vending business. Anna and Lazaros started out selling boughatsa, using a certified kitchen inside a building that is now the Cobalt Condominiums, Racket reports. Their first customer was Surdyk's, followed by a run of coffee shops that have since vanished from the city, and two years spent selling at the Uptown Art Fair.
From Deli Counter to Neighborhood Fixture
When Gardens of Salonica opened in 1991, it looked nothing like the restaurant Twin Cities diners know today. There were seven tables and two counters offering imported groceries and Häagen-Dazs, functioning more like a deli than a sit-down restaurant, per Racket's account. Full menus did not arrive until two years later.
Growth came quickly after that. Within three years, the couple had acquired the space next door, and within six years, they owned the building outright, according to Racket. The space itself carries its own handmade touch: the restaurant's 18-inch-thick brick walls were painted by Christoforides herself, who has said she did not lay the bricks but hand-painted them.
By the time Gardens of Salonica was named a 2019 Good Food 100 Restaurant, according to the restaurant's own website, gosalonica.com, it had built a reputation for traditional and modern Greek cuisine made with organic, wild-caught and locally sourced ingredients where possible. The restaurant's production facility sits in the basement below the dining room, with everything made on site, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported in a 2015 feature on the business. That same local sourcing philosophy extends to the restaurant's family-style catering, which the business describes as built on the best organic, local, pastured and wild-caught ingredients available, per its catering page.
A Neighborhood That Changed Around Her
Northeast Minneapolis looked very different when the restaurant opened its doors in 1991 at what is now its location on Fifth Street NE. Gardens of Salonica stayed put at that location, even as other longtime fixtures of the area came and went.
It is not the only Twin Cities Greek restaurant to reach the end of a long run in recent years. It's Greek to Me Taverna E Parea, which opened in 1982 under brothers Alkis and Argyrios Arambadjis and their spouses, permanently closed after more than 40 years in business, according to the Star Tribune. That restaurant, known for its outdoor dining space, had already changed hands once, sold to Nick and Athena Karos in 2016 before they ran it until September 2019. Alkis Arambadjis and longtime employee Erik Johnson later reopened it under a slightly altered name in 2020, before it closed again.
Looking Beyond the Restaurant Business
Christoforides has been candid about why she is stepping away. She has said she wants to be herself rather than spend all day thinking about business decisions, and that she is quitting the restaurant to live her own life, according to Racket's reporting. She has also said the restaurant was always meant to offer the best food for the money and for the health of the community.
Lazaros died, a loss that sits alongside Christoforides's decision to close the business the two built together. She still travels to Greece twice a year to visit her daughter.
