Nikol Zarbalas, 48, owner of Hellenic Republic in Coral Springs, was arrested on allegations that she failed to remit nearly $140,000 in sales taxes collected from customers. She also described to the Sun Sentinel a lengthy detention in Georgia and a 34-hour trip back to Florida.
According to a Sun Sentinel report, an investigator for the Florida Department of Revenue filed a charging document accusing Zarbalas of failing to turn over tax money collected from customers between 2021 and 2025. Zarbalas told the outlet she was arrested at an Atlanta airport on Oct. 9 while returning from a trip to Greece, where she said she had been filming a TV show.
Zarbalas told the Sun Sentinel she spent nearly two weeks in the Clayton County jail before being taken to Fort Lauderdale, a trip she said lasted 34 hours. The report says she was released on bail in Fort Lauderdale. She also described difficult jail conditions, including people screaming day and night and inmates who had committed violent acts.
Chef Says She Was Already Making Payments
Zarbalas told the Sun Sentinel she had been making monthly payments of $1,400 to the state under a payment plan and said she believed the state had agreed to work with her. She did not deny that she had previously been charged over the tax money.
She attributed the original nonpayment to her struggle to keep the restaurant alive during COVID, saying small businesses that did not receive loans or government aid faced serious difficulties during the pandemic. Her account echoes explanations offered in other recent Florida cases; the owner of McCray's Backyard BBQ & Seafood in Mangonia Park, who was accused of failing to turn over nearly $130,000 to the state, according to CBS12, also said the business had faced financial hardships and that he had tried to keep it afloat.
A Rising Profile for Hellenic Republic
Zarbalas’s public profile has grown alongside Hellenic Republic. She appeared on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives in 2023 and said Fieri praised her food. Earlier in 2026, she moved the restaurant from University Drive to a larger space on Atlantic Boulevard in Coral Springs.
That newer location, which had its soft opening on Jan. 6, reportedly offers 10 times the indoor capacity of the former spot, per coralspringsflnews.com. Zarbalas also previously ran a Fort Lauderdale restaurant called The Food Republic, which closed in 2025 after about a year in business, the Sun Sentinel's earlier coverage notes.
Vandalism Drew a Wave of Community Support
The Coral Springs restaurant has already weathered one public crisis this year. In March, Hellenic sustained damage to 10 windows at about 5:50 a.m. on a Saturday, an incident the Coral Springs Police Department classified as a criminal mischief case. Fans of Zarbalas rallied afterward, raising money to help cover repairs to the restaurant.
The sales-tax allegations against Zarbalas fit into a broader pattern of similar cases surfacing around South Florida. In Delray Beach, 62-year-old Francis Anthony Crupi was accused of intentionally failing to remit $20,550.25 in sales tax collected at Pizzeria Sophia between October 2023 and April 2024, and was charged with one count of third-degree felony tax evasion after his arrest by the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, according to CBS12. That case and the allegations against the McCray's Backyard BBQ owner, who is facing a first-degree felony charge, show unpaid sales-tax figures in Florida restaurant cases ranging from roughly $20,000 to nearly $140,000.
How Florida law and other cases compare
Florida Statutes section 212.15 says the amount of stolen revenue may be aggregated when determining the grade of an offense. That rule alone does not establish which charge or legal elements apply in Zarbalas’s case, or distinguish a delinquency from criminal tax evasion. In separate cases, WPBF reported that Talay Thai Cuisine operator Charles Soo was accused of failing to remit more than $23,000 in sales tax collected from March through August 2021 and faced multiple felony counts related to sales tax evasion. CW34 reported that Boynton Beach restaurant owner Kenson Fevrier faced a second-degree felony charge over an alleged failure to remit $38,337.47 collected from May 2020 through November 2024. Those reports describe accusations and charges in separate cases, not final outcomes.
