You’ve probably eaten loukoumades, the Greek doughnuts that seem to be at every market in Melbourne. Ditto for galaktoboureko, the syrupy cake available at various Greek bakeries. Bougatsa, though? It’s basically unknown outside the Greek community.
Kosta Kostidis and his mum, Martha Oplopiadis, want to change that with Bougatsaki. At 11am today, Saturday September 19, they’ll open what we feel confident calling Australia’s first shop dedicated to bougatsa, a flaky filo-based pie filled with sweet semolina-vanilla custard.
“It’s like a Greek vanilla slice,” Kostidis says. “In Greece you see it at every corner shop. Every corner shop is its own little bougatsa shop. I wanted to bring something like that down here. My goal is to have anyone and everyone eating my product.”
Kostidis started baking bougatsa (“boo-GAH-tsa”) at home, using a recipe from his pappous, after a back injury put him out of work as a plumber. “My grandpa was a baker his whole life when he was in Greece. He’s from Serres, up north, where bougatsa actually originates from,” he says.
From that came a pop-up at Northcote Festival 12 months ago, which sold out in five hours. Kostidis says the brand has been booked almost every week since to appear at soccer games, markets and festivals, but it couldn’t grow much as a mobile business.
Enter a cousin who married into the famous Melbourne fruiterer family, LaManna. Specifically, the branch that runs the gargantuan LaManna Essendon Fields and an associated food factory in Footscray. They got him a tiny corner tenancy inside Italiano’s Fresh Produce on Sydney Road, formerly a LaManna fruit shop. And the bougatsas are now being made at scale at the Footscray factory using filo imported from Greece, ready for Kostidis to collect and bake on-site.
Get it the traditional way, dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon, or with Kostidis’s own spins of Nutella, Biscoff, or honey and walnut. He’s also selling a savoury, gozleme-like version with spinach and cheese. All of it makes his pappous happy.
“He’s over the moon,” Kostidis says. “He kind of lives through me now. The biggest thing is that I put a smile on his face.”
Bougatsaki
403 Sydney Road, Brunswick
0402 517 737
Hours
Wed & Thu 9am–6pm
Fri & Sat 9am–8pm
Sun 10am–5pm