‘The last of the old school’: The owner of Wellington’s oldest restaurant served princes, paupers and many politicians
Tuesday, 26 May 2026
With a kind heart, a love of hospitality and a knack for cooking the perfect steak, restaurateur Kosta Sakoufakis will be sorely missed by the Wellington community.
The owner of the Green Parrot died on Sunday aged 86, following half-a-century of running the famed Wellington restaurant which first opened a century ago.
Sakoufakis had always taken a moment to greet everyone coming through the Green Parrot’s doors - young and old - and people had just gravitated to him, son Chris Sakoufakis said.
“He was just a lovely man… The most important thing was his family and the customers… It just makes you really proud, to have a father like that.”
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The restaurant on the corner of Taranaki and Wakefield St first opened 1926, and boasts near the same menu it had a century ago: lamb’s fry and bacon, a whole flounder, Virginia ham and pineapple and a 1kg, $65 t-bone steak included.
His father first started working in hospitality in 1958, Chris said, following his immigration to New Zealand from Greece.
After working in various milk bars and restaurants, he settled at the Green Parrot when family members Spiro and Angelo Sakoufakis took over in the 1970s, becoming a co-owner in 1987.
His father didn’t have a favourite dish to cook but his signature meal was steak, Chris said, with Kosta understanding how to cook each cut instinctively.
“He had a really good understanding of how meat cooks, and he was just passionate about what he does.”
While he didn’t have a favourite customer and made sure to treat all his customers “really special,” Sakoufakis did have an affection for veteran politician Winston Peters, who used to drop by and come into the kitchen to chat with Kosta all the time, Chris said.
The minister told The Post he had started the trend of politicians coming into the Green Parrot.
Back in the day, with Parliament often lasting until midnight, the restaurant was the only place people could enjoy a good quality meal at an affordable price during those late hours, Peters said.
Other MPs had given him stick until they had caught wind of the restaurant’s quality kai.
“They had extraordinarily reasonably priced and excellent meals and that's why they were popular. All sorts of people from what you might call the creative side of both society and politics went there… nothing was too much for them. You just asked what you wanted.”
The Green Parrot had even hosted famed Greek singer Nana Mouskouri one night, Peters said. He had given up his ticket to see her to his friend Brian Donnelly.
Peters’ favourite order had been raw scallops with Tabasco and the restaurant’s excellent Greek dressing. He also enjoyed a whole flounder, never overcooked.
“If they gave you a t-bone, well, you had to take a doggy bag, because you had three more meals in it after you finished what you could eat.”
The minister loved the restaurant so much, the Green Parrot had hosted a recent New Zealand First media event, with Sakoufakis “on the tools” all night, he said.
Restaurant critic David Burton said the Green Parrot was a remnant of a different Wellington, a restaurant that was “a real museum piece of how things used to be”.
“It was actually quite an interesting venue, in the sense it had things like the mixed grill with liver on it, which you wouldn’t get nowadays.”
Wellington Restaurant Association representative and Monsoon Poon owner Mike Egan called Sakoufakis “the last of the old school immigrant restaurateurs”.
Sakoufakis had been a pioneer of Wellington’s dining scene, he said ‒ serving everyone from princes to paupers and of course politicians.
The portion sizes at the Green Parrot were legendary, and, to Sakoufakis, his customers’ privacy was sacrosanct, no matter which journalist tried to dig into who had been dining with whom.
“[He] introduced generations of Wellingtonians to affordable full service dining when eating out was not commonplace,” Egan said.
The restaurant had continued with its original 1930s menu through every fad or trend the hospitality industry had endured over the past few decades, he said: serving zero fancy sourdough, “just good old sliced white bread to start you off”.
“No nouvelle cuisines, no dots of sauce on plates or microgreens. He would visit the meat wholesalers every week and choose which cattle beast he wanted his cuts to be taken from. Bluff oysters in short supply? Not at The Green Parrot: [Kosta] could always get them.”
World champion mountain runner Melissa Moon was a waitress at the Parrot in the late 80s. She had continued to keep in touch with Sakoufakis since then, often 'popping in' to catch up with her former boss who she remembers fondly as having a warm smile and an engaging energy.
'It is very sad, I was going to pop in and say hi on Saturday. It's a long time since I worked there, but he knew me really well, and would always have my favourite dish of deep-fried calamari ready for me to have on my breaks.“
Additional reporting done by senior reporter Julie Jacobson.