Jim Poll and family:
an institution in Manhasset
Jim Poll is one of the acknowledged patriarchs of Manhasset: tall, spare, and with the regal mustachios that are his trademark, he used to visit his uncle’s deli in Manhasset(the Plandome) when he was a boy and only three Greek families lived there (Lambardakis, Papson and Makris) while he dreamed of living there himself.
“I always wanted to have a house in Manhasset,” recalls the 88-year-old former shipping executive and legendary restaurateur. “So when I got married I bought my first home there in 1952.”
And the area wasn’t that much different then. “It was always like living in the country,” he says. “It’s now very affluent, but it always had very good schools and very good transportation to Manhattan: we now have a direct line that goes to Penn Station. No other area has that. You can get to Penn Station most days within a half hour.”
It was also a terrific place to raise his three boys Dean, George and Gillis (“They thank me for raising them in Manhasset”) as more and more Greeks are re-discovering. “There are so many now,” he says, “both older and younger.”
That includes a membership boom in the AHEPA Gold Coast chapter, of which he is a mainstay, and whose membership spiked when he introduced some perks. “We used to have about 40 members in the chapter and we would get about ten people coming down to the meetings in the American Legion Hall in Manhasset,” he remembers. “Then I started bringing food to the meetings and each meeting cost us about $600 for food and drinks. But now everybody flocked to the meetings.”
The trick was honed over Jim Poll’s long and storied career in the food business, which actually began with his father. The family name was Voyiatzis in Thrace, became Papadopoulos, and eventually became Poll in America when Angelo Poll arrived in 1910. Angelo opened the Angelo Poll specialty store on Lexington Avenue, and when he was killed in 1932 in a freak railroad accident, his brother took over and the store became known, as it continues today, as William Poll. "We still sell the most caviar in America," says Jim Poll, who was a delivery boy at the original store. During the war, Poll went into service in the Coast Guard, and after the war he got into shipping business with the Kulukundis firm and stayed there from 1947 to 1963, eventually becoming managing director.
"It was thrilling to be in shipping," he says. "Shipping is a fascinating business." He owned a tanker with Manuel Kulukundis, but when the old man retired from the business and the firm foundered, Poll was forced to seek other work. "I had to do something fast," he says. "And I did something fast and went into the restaurant business."
He heard about a restaurant for sale in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, right next to the legendary Lundy's, run by the equally-legendary Pappas family. "And I didn't buy it for $5000,” he admits. “But I went six months later and bought it for $55,000."
Pappas Restaurant under Poll became resurrected as a Brooklyn landmark and he became synonymous with it ("No matter where I went, they knew me,” he says. “I would have a hot dog in the street and people would say, 'Hey, Pappas, what are you doing here?' People come here and say, 'Hello, Mr. Pappas, I knew you from Sheepshead Bay.")
Then in 1971, he joined with some partners and opened the Casino Russe in Manhattan and he became known as "Count" Dimitri. "In the restaurant business, nobody cares who the owner is," says Poll. "In the nightclub they want to know the owner. All the movie stars wanted to know me and take my name down so they could go back and say, ‘Oh, I met Dimitri’...Henry Kissinger asked to meet me."
The sea still lured him, though, so he bought a 5000-ton ship called the MARTHA S and started making runs of grain and sugar to Central America for the Pillsbury corporation. But, unfortunately, the market fell, he had to sell the ship, and in the ‘70s he got back into the food business with three restaurants run out of the same kitchen in Rockefeller Center: the Bonjours Coffee Shop, Dawson's Pub, and La Petite Brasserie. His son Gillis, who had started as a bus boy at Pappas, helped to manage the restaurants and Dean worked all stations.
"My father always had some type of job for me," says Dean, “no matter what age I was. If I was eight years old, I could sweep the floors, if I was ten years old, I could clean shrimp, there was always a job for us...And the restaurant business is infectious. I always liked busy places and my father always had busy places. He had restaurants with a lot of synergy, with the big crowds coming in and having to deal with a lot of people. That’s the fun of it.”
Dean and his brothers were working in Rockefeller Center when the opportunity came up in 1979 for them to buy the Riverbay in Williston Park, then known as Ionian Sea Fare and featuring “a rowboat in the middle of the place," sniffs Poll.
The boys ran it and renamed it Pappas ("Because everyone knew the name," says the patriarch), and ten years later and after a $1 million extension was added, they spent another $700,000 and hired top architect Morris Nathanson (who later did Molyvos in Manhattan) to renovate the 260-seat restaurant.
"And then we didn't need the name Pappas anymore, we had a beautiful place and we rechristened it Riverbay, to emphasize its seafood menu,” he says.
In 1985, the brothers bought the old Manero's Restaurant in Roslyn, renovated that, and opened it as Bryant & Cooper in 1987. And they’ve expanded their empire ever since (Dean bought The Boathouse in Central Park and his brothers, who also own the Majors Steakhouses in Woodbury and Merrick, most recently opened Toku, an Asian restaurant in the Americana Shopping Center in Manhasset, where they also own the trattoria Cipollini).
Meanwhile, Jim Poll doesn’t sail anymore (he was a champion sailor who almost competed in the worlds) but he and his wife Alexandra travel to Florida for the winter, but always return to Manhasset for the spring.
“Manhasset is home,” he says. “I accomplished my dream when I got married and moved to Manhasset.”
