Interview Kriton Mina Poulis – Kilikio

Tell us about yourself

I’m Kriton Mina Poulis, I am from Greece, and I have been living in France for 8 years now. I worked in the "haute cuisine", among famous chefs and I ended my career as a head pastry chef with Pierre Hermé. I have launched this project, Kilikio, a gourmet grocery store working with producers from everywhere in Greece. We taste the products ourselves, the aim being to keep a good relationship with the producers, in order to always keep an eye on harvests and to always receive the good products. We also do this to be able to explain what products we use to our clients, show them how our recipes are made.

What is the concept of your store ?

Kilikio comes from the ancient Greek “kiliki”, which are the buffets Greeks used to organized for meditations and which they shared together. In Modern Greek however, it means “school’s canteen” or canteen for events such as festivals, concerts and others entertainments.

For the design of the store, we worked with a professional designer whom we asked a set based on a pixelated Greek landscape made of silk. We did this because our project is also about showing a different image of Greece, by displaying our products melted with our particular design.

Do you have an anecdote to share with us ?

I don’t have an anecdote but I do have a story. We, of course, have a lot of our neighborhood clients who come from Greece, and one day a client came with a picture and told me “If you can find the yoghurt on the picture, you’re the man”. So I take a look at the picture, I recognize where it was taken and it was Mytilene, on a Greek island. I made everything I could to bring these yoghurts, in order to make this client happy. I talked to my associate, who’s in Greece all the time to do the researches for the products, and he went to Mytilene to see the producer who’s living 50km away from the harbor. So we launched an order, but we were in November, and at this time of the year, ships have a hard time sailing, and the ship containing our yoghurts could not leave the, so we started to get worried about the yoghurts. We finally succeeded in getting the yoghurts and we called the client who asked for them and he was super happy. He felt the taste of holidays, the taste of his hometown.

How do you use Social Medias ?

Honestly, on this matter, we are not good, not good at all. We’re not really “connected”, but thanks to some apps and ideas, we are able to keep in touch and to use Social Medias more and more every day.  We want to invest in Social Medias, we know how important it is nowadays, for our clients, to be active on networks. We also don’t have any website yet, it takes some time to work on it but we are conscious we have to do it.

A last word?

We expect you numerous, we will be very happy to welcome you in our store, to make you discover our recipes and our project Kilikio, with open arms and always with a smile our face!