New Canaan's Kouzina launched on June 16, 2011. For two years, Brian Herlihy and Gina Douvas provided a strong base of supporters with quality Greek cuisine for almost two years. Recently closing the doors on that adventure, Douvas said the time has come to focus on family.
"I'm Greek, my husband is Italian and Irish. We were raised around cooking. We saw a niche where we could present authentic, quality meals for our community," Douvas said Tuesday. "As the business grew, we were missing out on family time. My husband would spend many Friday and Saturday nights there until well past midnight. As the busy season approached for summertime, we knew it would take away our ability to be together as a family. And that was more important to us than running a business. The decision was bittersweet."
Douvas said initially, the restaurant kept its doors closed on Sundays to provide her and Herlihy the opportunity to be together with a "young family" that includes a 3-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son who were 1 and 5 respectively when the restaurant opened.
"Just one day to really be a family."
Proving not enough to provide the familial growth she was determined to make a necessity, they made the decision to leave the restaurant world. But she said the move to grow closer would not keep them from continuing to service the New Canaan community after having grown such a loyal community following.
"We acquired this lot from a former Ford dealership and it was just a cement slab," she said of the restaurant's location. "Our vision was to open a small place in a beautiful location and we did that. We brought olive oil in from our family groves in Greece and used them on salads, in our cooking and bottled them for sale. Business really caught on and we saw great success and received a lot of good feedback for delivering wheat we hoped was a great product."
That would also lead to the possibility of Douvas and Herlihy providing the much sought-after homemade olive oil in the form of retail sales.
"We've been looking into private and catering events," she said. "We've also fielded requests from several restaurant owners who tasted our product and tasted our freshness and requested us to supply them with it. We've traveled back to the source for more olive oil and talked with some of our family dairy farmers and have some things in the works, so stay tuned. We're working on what we can provide and where, and taking a bit of time off to decide what the next step will be."
With a dream to deliver a fresh product from a couple with little culinary experience other than growing up in environments that focused on entertaining friends and family around quality meals, Douvas said the sweat equity—the time and energy that went into launching the restaurant only made them more happy to have tried and succeeded.
"We really had a great client base," she said. "We definitely want to thank the community for their patronage and for supporting what we set out to do as novice restauranteurs. It was a wonderful experience and a really great opportunity for us, but we decided to not let either our quality suffer or allow ourselves to lose touch with our children. You just can't put a price on being with family"
For customers interested in contacting Douvas or Herlihy, Douvas said the couple could be reached at bherlihy01@aol.com.
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