Drone Pizza Deliveries and Outer Space Restaurants

Drone Pizza Deliveries and Outer Space Restaurants

Jim Nicopoulos is a long-time Polyface patron and restaurant owner with some big ideas. He is never afraid to try something new. He bought Primo Family Restaurant in 2007 and he hasn’t stood still since. Primo is located in Alexandria Virginia and if you are ever in that neck of the woods, be sure to look them up!

Jim's daughter Tania is now the Food and Beverage Manager at Primo. While attending the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in New York, she wrote a paper about Polyface Farm. That’s why Primo began using Polyface beef, chicken and pork in numerous menu items. It was a big idea because the 100% grassfed beef was challenging to work with due to the low fat content. But they stuck with it, experimented, and developed new techniques.

Jim has been in restaurant life since he was born in Washington, DC. His father was a waiter at that time. Jim’s parents met in Greece when his father bought a winning lottery ticket at the Greek Orthodox Church for a free trip to Greece. The Washington Post carried a story about it in the 1950s. He went to Greece and came home with a bride.

His father’s restaurant had an event hall, a dining room, and a bar. Jim learned from his father and through trial and error. The more punishing the error, the better he learned. He could make minor errors repeatedly until they interfered with the profit margin. Then he had to make changes. The kitchen, the bar, and the dining room were the classroom.

Jim describes the transition from owning a 90-foot bar next to the White House to owning a family restaurant in the suburbs as “going from Sodom and Gomorrah to monastery”. The culture is completely different.

When asked what’s in the future, Jim, ever a visionary, dreams big again: a restaurant on the space station. “I’d ask Mr. Bezos to give me transport. It would be two tables of two. You would sit by a window. It takes an hour and a half to go around the planet at 20,000 miles an hour. Every time you saw a continent the menu would change. Food indigenous to that continent would be served. It would be a 2, 3 or 4 hour event, circle the globe twice, have a beautiful experience, then fly back”. He says he'd "hire chefs from all over the world to staff a rotating squad in space to serve them, and I’d love to greet them and be their host. What a way to impress your girlfriend! Imagine having Polyface proteins served on a space station!"

In the future Jim predicts that people will use AI to eat. Finding a restaurant like Primo will be rare and expensive. “McDonalds already opened the first non-human restaurant in Texas. Nobody works there. This is the most innovative, highest R&D resource national chain on the planet. That means this is what’s coming. Walmart started drone delivery this month in Arkansas and Texas.” Who knows, one day Primo might give it a try. Just another big idea for Jim Nicopoulos. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a pizza drone!

We appreaciate Jim's imagination, as he creates ideas and illustrates possibilities - ever experimenting and developing ways to keep up with these mind-bending times!  And we appreciate their restaurant's patronage through the years!