2025 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner: Nick Koikos
Most of you don’t know me, but I am Bob Carlton, and before I retired this summer, I wrote for many years about the food, culture, people and places of Alabama for The Birmingham News and our website AL.com.
One of the joys of my job was not only getting to share the stories of the people who serve our food community but also coming to know and growing to love them.
Folks like our 2025 SFA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, Nicky Koikos.
To me, Nicky and his older brother, the late Jimmy Koikos, personify what the Southern Foodways Alliance, this symposium and the award he is about to receive are all about.
From Edna Lewis and Leah Chase to Bill Smith and Birmingham’s own Frank Stitt—all past winners—the Lifetime Achievement Award honors, in the SFA’s own words, “our leading lights, a man or woman whose lifework has proved a beacon for us all . . . the sort of person who has made an indelible mark upon our cuisine and our culture.”
That’s Nicky in a nutshell.
Nicky grew up about 15 miles west of Birmingham in blue-collar Bessemer, a working-class city whose chief industries at the time were mining ore, making steel and manufacturing railroad cars.
He started working for his father, Bill Koikos, at the Bright Star as a teenager, and then, after earning a business degree from the University of Alabama and serving in the Alabama Army National Guard, he came home to Bessemer in 1968 to work in the restaurant full-time, joining his father and his big brother.
He has never left.
For more than a half-century, Nicky and Jimmy – who eventually bought the restaurant from their father – made an inseparable team, polishing, preserving and protecting the Bright Star like the cherished family heirloom that it is. Their personalities meshed with their respective roles.
Charismatic and outgoing, Jimmy worked the front of the house, greeting his guests and seeing them to their tables. The reserved and methodical Nicky managed the cooks and the servers, making sure the dishes got out of the kitchen on time and as ordered.
He handled the payroll, planned the work schedules and in a pinch, waited and bused tables.
As Nicky’s cousin Andreas Anastassakis, who will be cooking our Greek dinner tonight with Tim Hontzas, told me the other day: “Jimmy was the one everybody knew, and he was the face of the Bright Star. But Jimmy would have been the first to tell you he never could have done it without his brother. His brother was the backbone. Nicky put all the systems in place that still make this place what it is today.”
If you know Nicky, you know that he is a more than a little overwhelmed by this kind of attention.
When I met him at the Bright Star a few weeks ago to pick his brain so I could prepare a few remarks for today, the first thing he said to me was: “Is there more than just one person who’s going to get the award?”
When I told him, no, he was it, he went on to say, in his humble way:
“I don’t really consider myself as being an Achievement Award person in the restaurant industry. I think I’ve survived, is what it is.”
Nicky, who celebrated his 80th birthday earlier this year, recently sold his interest in the Bright Star to his cousin Andreas, ensuring that the restaurant that Tom Bonduris started 118 years ago will remain in the family for years to come.
But he’s still there, still earning a paycheck, and chances are good that if you stop by the restaurant for some of the Bright Star’s famous snapper throats and a slice of that coconut pie, Nicky will stop by your table to check in on you and make sure everything’s right.
The Bright Star is, after all, his life.
Everyone, please join me in congratulating our 2025 Southern Foodways Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Nicky Koikos.
—Bob Carlton
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