The brothers behind Ocean Basket

Brothers Peter “Fats” and George Lazarides grew Ocean Basket from one store where customers had to bring their own food to South Africa’s most popular seafood restaurant. 

Today, Ocean Basket is one of the country’s most beloved eateries, but the brothers had to overcome many challenges when starting the business. 

Fats and George come from a Greek family where their father worked as a carpenter, and their mother was a housewife. 

Their mother, Mama Liza, was the source of their love and deep-rooted appreciation for food. It was also the inspiration for what would one day become Ocean Basket. 

Fats realised early on that academics were not his calling and left school at the age of 16 to do his military conscription. 

In 1980, he got his first taste of the food industry while working as an assistant manager at Squire’s Loft in Sun City.

“That’s where I fell in love with the restaurant business. That’s where I saw myself. That’s where I knew that that’s my calling,” he told CNBC Africa. 

However, his path to becoming a restauranteur wasn’t straightforward, and he moved around between a number of different trades in the years to come. 

After leaving Squire’s Loft, Fats worked as a plumber with the Drain Surgeon for a year before taking over his father’s workshop and working as a shopfitter during the 1980s.

Finally, in 1988, he and his brother started their own seafood restaurant called Fats Seafood Restaurant. “It worked, but I realised it was not “the one”. So, I sold it after a few years,” he told finweek.

In 1995, while Fats was working as a receiving manager at Spar in Bruma, his wife found an empty spot in the Menlyn Park shopping centre, which used to be a Biggie Best, and suggested that he open a restaurant there.  

That’s when Fats and his younger brother, George, decided to open a seafood restaurant. 

However, securing the lease wasn’t easy. When Fats went to Menlyn to apply, he met someone who would change his life forever.

“His name was Yuri Haussmann. I walked into his office and said, ‘You’ve got an empty store.’ He said yes, and I said, ‘I’d like to take it’.”

However, there were 40 people in line for the store before Fats, he explained on the Shapeshifter show with Bruce Withfield. 

Haussmann asked about Fats’ business plan. “I said to him, ‘I don’t have one. I’m the business plan.’”

The pair spoke for another hour, and when Fats walked out of the office, the shop was his. Afterwards, he called his attorney friend and asked him to read the lease.  

“He says, ‘Fats, whatever lease I read, you’ve got nothing to lose. What are they gonna take, your shoes? Sign the dotted line and walk out.’ I waited… I signed the dotted line. I walked out and came home with the lease in my hand.”

Once they had secured the store space, they were faced with another challenge: funding. 

Fats said the entire store was built on loans. He went to his friends, begging for money and promising to pay them back. Once they had enough funds, they built the store in just one month.

The concept for their restaurant came from the fact that seafood was only something enjoyed by wealthy people at the time. 

Inspired by their mother’s cooking, they wanted to create delicious, accessible seafood served in generous portions. 

“We believed there was a demand. We believed that nobody could eat accessible seafood. Nobody could eat affordable seafood,” Fats told CNBC Africa.

“That’s when we came up with the idea: fish and chips in a pan. Calamari, Kingklip, sole, prawns, and oysters – all affordable. And we made it affordable. I mean, fish and chips in 1995 was R9.99, and that is how it all started.”

The beginning of the restaurant journey wasn’t easy. The lease placed many restrictions on them to protect the other restaurants in the mall, greatly limiting the food they could sell. 

They couldn’t serve breakfasts, desserts, salads, pasta, liquor, tea, or coffee. 

They were restricted to fish, so the menu consisted of only five items: Hake, Kingklip, sole, calamari, and prawns. Apart from chips, rice, and bread, that was pretty much it.

Even their drinks menu was limited to wine, Coke, and Castle Light.

If people wanted anything else, they had to bring it themselves – and that is exactly what Fats and George told people to do. 

People would come with their cooler boxes, salads, desserts, and liquor.

“After a while, we loved it. We didn’t want anything to change because that brought the queues. We became the talk of the town,” Fats explained to CNBC Africa.

People could eat a good, affordable meal and bring all of their extras with them. 

Their lease restricted not only their menu but also their operating hours. The store had to close by 19:00 every night and 15:00 on Sundays, even though people were lining up around the block.

It was these queues that were one of the store’s biggest challenges, with 50 to 70 people waiting for a seat at any given time. 

Even as the business expanded, the long queues remained. “Up until the 40th store, the queues never went away,” Fats said.

“Menlyn Park, the regional store, queued for five years. Monday to Sunday, there was a continuous queue for the first five years.”

Despite the popularity of the restaurants, they did everything themselves, from sweeping the floors to doing the banking. “Those were the most amazing days of our lives.”

“My brother was in the kitchen with four or five crew. I was in the front on the till like a good old Greek boy playing the piano with about three or four waiters.”

When the restaurant opened, South Africa had only recently become a democracy, which meant they had to build a business in a rapidly changing environment.

“Everybody was weary, but we were ambitious, and all we wanted was success. We saw it from the very first store. We saw how people took to us,” Fats explained to CNBC Africa. 

The business started expanding almost immediately. Within six months, there was a second Ocean Basket, and by 2000, there were nearly 80 stores.

They started by targeting the main malls in South Africa since that was where the most foot traffic was. “Once we had the ten main malls, it just snowballed. It went out of control.”

After more than 15 years of running the company, though, Fats made the decision to step down and hand the reigns over to Grace Harding, who is the group’s CEO today. 

He met Harding when she helped him set up the take-away seafood restaurant, Fishaways, in collaboration with Steers. 

“The best thing I ever did in my life was step down. You’ve got to understand something. We’re not educated people, we’re just café keepers and a café keeper can read and educate himself up to a point,” he said on the Shapeshifter show.

“I reached my point in 2012 when I brought Grace along.”

While the brother remained involved in the business, Harding took the reigns and continued building the business to what it is today, with over 230 Ocean Basket restaurants in 16 countries across the globe. 

She shares Fats’ main vision for the business, which is to achieve longevity. 

“There’s no reason to, and there’s no reason not to do it,” Fats said. “You know, only the people can be so destructive and destroy this brand. The brand can’t destroy itself.” 

“The product is phenomenal. The pricing is good. The shops are clean. We make people laugh and smile. They’re eating seafood at an affordable price. So what can go wrong?”