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Feature article
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At age 90, Jim Kalogeros is still peerless
By Fred Sauceman
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| Alex and Jim Kalogeros take a photo break during the 90th birthday celebration. Fred Sauceman photo. |
Over 1,000 people showed up at The Peerless Restaurant in Johnson City the evening of Feb. 9. While some were motivated by a “purchase one get another entrée of equal or lesser value free” offer, most folks came out to shake the hand or pat the shoulder of owner Jim Kalogeros, who had turned 90 years of age two days before.
Ruby Christian was there. She had worked the reservation stand out front for 52 years. Sherman Cox turned out, too. He was the Peerless butcher for three decades. Jim’s old square-dancing buddies came in full force.
“I’ve been so busy smiling, I have wrinkles in my face,” said Alex Kalogeros, her Greek beauty still shining through after 62 years of marriage to Jim.
When I called the following Sunday afternoon to get Jim’s thoughts about the big birthday celebration, Alex told me he was at the restaurant, doing paperwork.
Despite his age, Jim puts in 60-hour work weeks at The Peerless. Usually he doesn’t work on Sunday, but all the hoopla put him behind on the books.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Jim said when I asked him to reflect on his party. “I’m a modest type guy.”
Traffic came to a halt repeatedly on North Roan Street that night so cars could enter and exit the Peerless parking lot. Over 500 birthday cards had poured in.
“We’ve had 12 employees stay with us for over 40 years,” Jim recalled with great pride.
I’m not surprised. Jim Kalogeros is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. “I give Jesus Christ all the credit,” Jim says. “He’s the most important.”
A descendant of explorer William Clark (of Lewis and Clark) and the son of a Greek immigrant, Jim earned his pilot’s license at age 54. He took up golf at 60. He was water-skiing every summer on Boone Lake until the age of 89.
Permanently mounted over the fireplace at The Peerless is a photograph of John Kalogeros, Jim’s dad. He came through Johnson City in the 1930s and accurately predicted a bright future for the town. The signs were right. East Tennessee State College was on the move, and the veterans at Mountain Home had just received a $100 bonus.
So in 1938, John opened a barbecue joint on Market Street. His 71-year-old barbecue sauce recipe is still blended in The Peerless kitchen today and served over boneless chicken breasts.
Since the University of Tennessee Volunteer football team went undefeated and unscored upon during the 1939 regular season, John bet his friends steak dinners that UT would win the 1940 Rose Bowl. Tennessee lost, shut out by the University of Southern California Trojans 14-0. From that point on, The Peerless was known as a steakhouse, and a mighty good one.
Jim watched his father’s business take hold, absorbing even the smallest of details along the way — adding peas to Greek salads and serving baskets of saltine crackers with butter on every table. The Kalogeros kitchen philosophy has always been deceptively simple: Buy the best meat you can find and do as little to it as possible.
The Peerless would eventually move to the north side of town, surrounded at the time mainly by pasture fields. But with his father’s eye to the future, Jim knew that side of town would grow. In 2005, the Kalogeros family even opened up a plush new restaurant on the west side of Knoxville.
Along the way, Jim has been inducted into the Johnson City-Jonesborough-Washington County Chamber of Commerce Hall of Fame and the Tennessee Restaurant Association Hall of Fame. He and Alex raised two boys and two girls.
Jim Kalogeros represents a generation of Greek restaurant owners in the South who had the ingenuity to adapt their cooking styles to the tastes of the region, folks like the Regas and Peroulas families in Knoxville and the Koikos clan in Bessemer, Alabama.
And he embodies a very basic principle in the restaurant business: As an owner, you’ve got to be there to make sure everything runs right.
Laughing rapid-fire like a 20-year-old as he leans over a customer’s table to share a memory on this night of celebration, Jim Kalogeros is in his element. He is peerless.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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