Home Away From Home : ‘A Socializing Place’

When she came to Los Angeles in 1982 to continue her medical studies, Dr. Sofi Lazaridis-Konstantinidis was so homesick for Greece that she decided to do something about it.

She opened her own Greek restaurant so she could get together with her compatriots.

“Los Angeles is a city you can get lonely in very quickly,” she said recently at Sofi’s, her comfortable restaurant on West 3rd Street in Los Angeles. “I never thought it would be so lonely. But now this place has become like my Greek home in Los Angeles. People who come say it reminds them of home, or of a Kafe Nion--that’s a cafe where people meet, a socializing place.”

Lazaridis-Konstantinidis, 32, who grew up in the Mt. Olympus area of Greece, came to America to study at UCLA. She had earned degrees in pharmacology and medicine, but she had no formal chef’s training.

“I wasn’t planning to open a restaurant. I was going to get a job and go on with my studies. I’m not a professional chef. I do home-style cooking here. I learned from my mother’s family; my aunts and my grandmother were very good cooks. They were unusual cooks. They loved to have something new and exciting.”

Lazaridis-Konstantinidis opened her first restaurant on Robertson Boulevard, then moved to her current location in 1984, when she found a place that reminded her of a favorite dining spot in Athens.

The entrance has a long hallway leading from the street into a bougainvillea-covered patio. The interior features light woods and different levels to make diners feel as if they are in someone’s home.

“Greeks can’t live without talking and socializing, and that’s what we do here,” she says. “We serve until 11, but we go on until 2 or 3 in the morning. Greeks are used to eating late, so we go on into the night.”

Lazaridis-Konstantinidis still does the “main menu cooking,” even though she and her husband, architect Konstantine Konstantinidis, now have an 8-month-old baby, George.