0thello

Ken Skoullos has spent forty-eight years in food. Geneva is what came after.

In the summer of 1974 a young sergeant major was stationed at Othello's Tower, the Venetian fortress that guards the harbour at Famagusta. He was in his early twenties. When Turkey invaded that July, he and his men left the position by swimming out into the sea and along the coast. His family, in the village of Achna, lost everything they owned inside a week. Achna is still under occupation.

Five years later, on the other side of the world, he and his brother Theo bought a souvlaki bar on Lygon Street.

He kept his job. There had been a month in Athens, then several years in London — a clothing factory by day, college after — and then Melbourne, chosen over Britain because his family was here.

His first work in the country was at Flinders Street railways. After that, an office manager's role at a logistics company, which is where he first saw how goods actually move: the routes, the timings, the margins that live or die on whether a thing arrives when it said it would.

So the souvlaki bar was run around a working week. Eighteen months later he bought an apartment.

When he opened his first restaurant, he called it Othello.

There is a particular education in a small food business, and it is not the one people imagine. A shop like that is a manufacturing operation with a counter attached. The romance is on the plate. The business is in the hundred small decisions made before anyone sits down — what to order, what to hold, what to throw out, how long a person will stand in a queue before deciding to go somewhere else.

You learn it by getting it wrong for a while, in public, with your own money.

Ken learned it, and then went looking for the same problem at a larger scale.

AK Foods came out of receivership. The Victoria Police canteens followed, and ran for a decade. Then Brunswick, in 1988.

Through the nineties and the two thousands the business was assembled one acquisition at a time. Smallgoods. A Greek importer. A bakery supplier. A garlic bread manufacturer. A biscuit plant built at Tullamarine to supply airlines and aged care. A cheese facility, then a larger purpose-built one. Frozen pizza. Supermarket contracts with Coles and Metcash IGA.

In 2001 he bought a bakery supply company called Hudson Pacific from a man named Frank Karkalas. He took the name for the whole group — "I liked the name, and it sounded right and corporate" — and he kept Frank. The two of them have worked together for twenty-five years since.

By 2016 the group turned over $139 million and supplied more than two thousand kitchens across the state.

That year it was sold to Retail Food Group, a listed company. Four years later Ken and Frank bought it back. It trades as Hudson Food Group now, wholly owned by the family again, running more than five hundred products out of Tullamarine.

Zoe and Andreas grew up inside all of it.

Supplying a kitchen teaches you what a kitchen needs. Running one teaches you something else entirely — how a queue forms and where it ought to form, why the table by the window is worth two at the back, what hour the light stops being useful, and how people decide, mostly without noticing, whether they will come again.

Geneva is where those two educations meet a third.

The decision was not a change of direction so much as the same instinct given somewhere larger to go.

Everything the family had built until then had been built, in the end, to be traded. Development offered the opposite, the ability to own what you make, and to go on owning it. A building stands on a street for decades with your name attached to it, and the only question that finally matters is whether it is still working in year ten.

It also gave the family one table to work at. Ken has spent forty-eight years learning how a room earns its keep. Zoe and Andreas learned the same thing. Development is where both of those educations turn into something that outlasts the people who made it, and where the lessons honed by working with the the very best the industry has to offer.

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