The year was 1978 when Vasilios Konstantopoulos and his brother emigrated from Greece to the United States, where they started working in restaurants together. Six years later, Konstantopoulos — better known now to customers as Bill — opened up his own restaurant, Bill’s Place, in Brookfield.
Bill’s Place, now located in LaGrange Park, celebrated its 40th anniversary Monday. The fast-food eatery serves classic Chicago fare like burgers, hot dogs, gyros, Italian beef, hot and cold sandwiches and a long list of sides. It also serves pizza, pasta and salads. To mark the day, the restaurant featured decorative balloons, face-painting for kids from 5:30-7:30 p.m. and 40-cent plain hot dogs until close.
Konstantopoulos, 70, said he hadn’t originally planned to open Bill’s Place at its first location in Brookfield, but he did so after his friend who owned the property encouraged him to start the business up.
“I was new in the United States. I knew not much about where Brookfield was, or LaGrange Park,” he said in an interview Monday. “He [brought] me here. He said, ‘Stay and work.’ I did, and I tried to do the best I could.”
He said his past work in restaurants is what led him to open up his own.
“I had no choice, and I had to make a living,” he said, adding that he felt it was the right time for him to go into business on his own. “I never left from the community, so it turned out to be a good choice. [Better] than dying.”
Konstantopoulos said he made little money for the first few years of the restaurant’s life; he worked seven days a week with no other employees at the shop aside from a local woman who acted as a translator for customers, as his English was bad at the time.
“Little by little, things got better,” he said.
However, after 12 years in Brookfield, things took a turn for the worse. Konstantopoulos said the restaurant’s landlord, the same friend who first showed him the location, raised rent prices in order to push Bill’s Place out of the property. As a result, the restaurant owner had to find a new location. He said he wanted to stay as close to the original location as possible.
In 1995, with a loan from the local bank, Konstantopoulos bought available office space at 1146 N. Maple Ave. in LaGrange Park and renovated the building into the Bill’s Place that many know today, complete with blue ceiling fans, blue checkered tiles and blue seating on the inside that match the blue awning and window sill outside. Once he got the restaurant up and running at its second location, he said loyal customers followed him north of 31st Street and continued to support the business.
“Without the support from the community, I couldn’t do it,” Konstantopoulos said. “Where I am now, today, after 40 years, I owe everything to the bank and to the community.”
He said the other secret to keeping Bill’s Place running is the sense of hospitality that he and his employees have worked to foster inside the restaurant. He said some of the eatery’s employees have been there for up to 20 years, which customers have noticed as well and has contributed to the sense of hospitality.
“It’s a combination, to be somebody successful,” he said. “Me, the employees and the customers. If something of the three doesn’t work, [the restaurant] doesn’t work.”
With 40 years of running Bill’s Place under his belt, Konstantopoulos said he plans to stay with the restaurant and in the community for the rest of his life. He said he’s sure that his son, who works at the restaurant, will continue to run it the way he has.
But just because the restaurant is celebrating the past does not mean Konstantopoulos isn’t also looking to the future. At the end of July, he said, Bill’s Place installed a new machine for roasting chicken that makes the chicken come out “much, much, much, much better” than before.
Overall, he said Bill’s Place owes its continued success to the same community that helped the restaurant survive its move two decades ago.
“No question about it, it was not easy. A lot of problems, difficulties, but again, the support from the community makes my life much easier,” Konstantopoulos said of his four decades running the restaurant. “I believe the customers have the choices today to go somewhere else, but they choose me. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel responsible. It makes me feel I’m obligated to serve them. And I thank them. Without them, nothing.”
