George’s Greek Cafe, a cherished local restaurant in Downtown Long Beach, closed on Sunday after its owner was evicted for failing to pay rent since last summer.
The full-service restaurant and bar served on Pine Avenue for decades after being opened — and later sold — by the Loizides family, who still run George’s Greek Cafe in Belmont Shore.
Court records show that a company operated by a Beverly Hills man named Behnam Ghasseminejad bought the Pine Avenue restaurant in 2023 but stopped paying rent last July, racking up more than $70,000 in past due payments.
After a months-long court fight, a judge ordered Ghasseminejad and his company to vacate the property, along with paying back rent and penalties totalling $194,200. Workers were removing televisions and other items from the property on Monday, a day after the restaurant ceased operations.
Ghasseminejad did not immediately respond to emails and a phone call from the Long Beach Post.
The closure marks the end of an era for the storied restaurant started by a well-liked Long Beach family.
Nicky Loizides, daughter of the cafe’s original owner George Loizides, said she was aware of the trouble facing the new owners.
Nicky Loizides, who still runs the George’s in Belmont Shore, said the two restaurants used some of the same vendors, and she had been getting calls from them asking to charge its orders to her restaurant, which she refused.
At least one vendor, Fontis and Sons Imports, filed suit in February seeking to collect on debts from the Downtown restaurant.
The Greek eatery had been a fixture on Pine Avenue since it opened at a different location next to Farmers & Merchants Bank in the late 1990s.
George Loizides, a Greek immigrant who moved to Long Beach from Zimbabwe in 1980, opened it under the name George’s Greek Deli.
About 16 years ago, the restaurant moved further down Pine Avenue and expanded to a full-service restaurant.
In 2006, he expanded to Belmont Shore and opened another location in Lakewood in 2008.
George Loizides and his wife, Rodou, spent the majority of their time at the restaurant on Pine Avenue, Nicky Loizides said.
George used to stand outside the restaurant and “greet everybody that walked by,” according to his daughter.
“People would just come by sometimes just to get a hug from my dad,” she said. “And when he hugged you, you felt it. He meant it, it was who he was as a person.”
After George Loizides died in 2019 at age 83, followed shortly after by his wife, ownership of his restaurants was split among his three children.
Demitri “Jimmy” Loizides moved to Solvang before their parents’ death, and brother Euripides Loizides was unable to work in the restaurant industry for medical reasons, leaving Nicky Loizides in charge of three restaurant locations, she said.
In 2023, they decided to sell the Downtown and Lakewood spots.
Kent and Jacqueline Killian, owners of Sunrise Café on Lakewood Boulevard and Carson Street, bought the Lakewood restaurant.
Nicky Loizides took majority ownership of the Belmont Shore location, where she still serves her mother’s recipes.
There, she does everything from working the bar to bookkeeping, which was her career before she joined “the family business,” she said.
For newcomers to the restaurant, she recommended the lamb chops.
“This is all I have left of my parents, and I want to make them proud and keep their legacy going and keep their memory alive,” Nicky Loizides said.