Tucson survivors: Pappoule's transcended the mall food court

Imagine the Tucson Mall the year it opened, 1982.

Back then it looked the same but newer, with more indoor plants and fewer empty stores. Sears was a destination for glamour shots, and instead of Dillard’s and Macy’s, they had Diamond’s and Robinsons-May.

Food courts were in their heyday. Families owned and ran these restaurants, often coming from other parts of the country and bringing new cuisines with them. Pappoule’s Greek restaurant opened in March of the same year.

“I had customers coming in and asking for the gyro taco,” Michael Cotsones said.

Michael is the son of Pappoule’s original owners, the husband-and-wife team John and Angeline “Angie” Cotsones. The Greek family had moved from Chicago to Tucson and quickly found community in the other food court proprietors. Their story in Tucson is a long one — despite the decline of malls and a pandemic, they’ve survived for nearly half a century, now located at 7475 N. La Cholla Blvd.

“My mom and dad had a lot of personality, were very involved with different things in Tucson, friends,” Michael said. “We just kind of blended well. The original Tucson Mall was kind of a group of different people. We had the Christiani family — I don’t know if you remember the Joey mom commercials from a few years ago — but they had a couple places (a burger spot and an Orange Julius). There was a great little Italian restaurant from Ralph Larocca, a friend of mine. He did the pizza in the mall at the time. Originally, it was all kinds of local, transplanted people who had done food things before.”

The Cotsones family was the No. 1 seller in a thriving, locally-owned scene.

“The first 10 years of the mall was kind of a fun place,” Michael said. “From a business standpoint, you know, we — because of the air conditioning and it being enclosed — we were busy June, July and August when, for a lot of other businesses, was a really slow time. We actually had a good summer business, back to school, besides the holiday business, made the mall really popular.”

tucson mall christmas tree 1999 — The Tucson Mall was pretty crowded with shoppers the day after Thanksgiving, in 1999.
James S. Wood

When the 10-year leases ran out, the mall raised rent too high for most families to afford the ingredients behind their menus and to pay their staff well.

“We couldn’t sell food with food costs of 35, 36, 37%, when we’re paying 20% of our margins in rent, OK? That’s why it became kind of like, just pizza, Subway — I don’t even think Subway is there anymore ... but the rents that the mall would charge just really didn’t align with anything other than 20% food cost, which just isn’t great food,” he said. “Panda does a good job, for the most part, with a very low food cost. Pizza has a low food cost,” he said.

Yet, as the best-sellers, they managed to expand during this time. Tucsonans like my parents formed an allegiance to Pappoule’s with love for hard-to-find Greek specialties like avgolemono soup. Generations of high school students like Michael’s son, Chris, worked behind the counter sometimes even through undergrad at the University of Arizona.

Michael came out from Chicago to help open Pappoule’s second location. When his mom died in 1991, he took over the business.

In his lifetime, Michael has witnessed the rise and fall of enclosed malls, as he calls them.

“We’ve been through ups and downs, economy, recessions — y’know, 42 years in Tucson, there’s not many of us who can say that,” he said.

The next time the lease renewal came up, the mall raised its rent again. At the time, Pappoule’s was the last family-run, non-chain restaurant at Tucson Mall.

Michael decided to leave the food court. He closed the Tucson and Park Place Mall locations, and instead opted for a full-service restaurant lease, attached to but outside of the Foothills Mall.

“People still came to Pappoule’s at Tucson Mall to eat at Pappoule’s. It could’ve been a destination location for them, but this was a little different,” Michael said.

“At Foothills, we could expand our menu, have sit-down (seating), we have patio (seating),” he said. “It was better for liquor sales, we only had a beer and wine license for years. Even though we were still fast-casual, it became more of a full-restaurant experience.”

“When you have an outside location, you’re not purely dependent on the mall. You’re dependent on yourself: what your reputation is and what value you give people,” he said.

The prescient move insulated Pappoule’s from the steep decline of in-person retail shopping that came with e-commerce.

“Chick-fil-A was in the Tucson Mall for six, seven years. When an opportunity opened up for them to buy a building across the street from Tucson Mall, they jumped at that,” Michael said.

Michael witnessed the hollowing out of the Foothills Mall without having it affect his bottom line.

“Over the years, the mall regressed — it was a five, 10-year process. The Foothills Mall really took a huge negative tilt when the mall, the discount mall opened up in Twin Peaks, OK? (Foothills) was a discount mall for a number of years and it was successful. When they built the other one, people like Nike and Levi went out and built new stores in Twin Peaks. One by one, those retailers started leaving the mall. Over that time, Pappoule’s did OK. We never had a negative year,” Michael said.

Michael said that when they were inside Tucson Mall, families would stop by Pappoule’s as a convenient treat. When they were outside the Foothills Mall, families like mine would make an outing of going to Pappoule’s as a restaurant, pairing the meal with a movie or a trip to Barnes & Noble. Pappoule’s proximity to the mall added to the destination, but wasn’t the primary focus of the visit.

Today, the Foothills Mall, and all its food court vendors, are no more. Bourn Companies bought the shell of a mall and recently began demolition. Though plans for a new mall have been discussed since 2019, the vision for the new property changed dramatically in its first year of planning and development when the pandemic hit.

“It changed because of COVID, and, I imagine, y’know the changing face of retail. I don’t know, (Bourn) has more of a heartbeat on it than I do,” Michael said.

Bourn is now developing a mixed-use property, with residential units, entertainment options like a stage, “with retail sprinkled in,” Michael said. Pappoule’s will be one of the dining options among a portfolio. He compared the project repeatedly to the Kierland Commons in Phoenix. “That’s kind of the way it’s gonna go,” Michael said.

Pappoule’s closed for its own renovation during five weeks in 2022. Part of the remodel included an expansion into a neighboring lease that opened up, adding more seating and enhancing the atmosphere.

“Now you can sit at our place, hear our music. We have our TVs on,” Michael said. He now has a full liquor license, which allows him to set up a bar.

“Maybe we’ve been lucky,” he said. In at least one instance, they were. The “Barbie” movie opened a few weeks ago and the blockbuster brought people in droves to the nearby movie theater right as demolition of Foothills Mall was beginning.

“Now, even with the mall being wiped out, we had groups of people that came in and we had ‘Barbie’ parties for three weeks. You know, girls coming in, dressed in pink. They’re going to see ‘Barbie’ and they came to Pappoule’s.”

Michael attributes Pappoule’s decades of success more directly to his employees.

“We had the original chef at Tucson Mall in 1982 retire from Pappoule’s after we left Tucson Mall. He put in 30, 30-plus years and basically retired,” Michael said. “He was a big reason there was continuity of people. Even in our location now, the people who were working here, some have been here for 25 years, some 20 years. For the most part, we’ve had good people, treated them well and they’ve stayed with us. That continuity is very important to us. It’s not an everyday thing that happens. But because of the family-type environment that we provided, it kept people here working.”

When Michael left for a trip to Greece for a few weeks this summer, he left his son in charge of the restaurant.

“Chris worked here all through high school. Everyone says, oh I want to go to California, stuff like that, but you have to work two jobs to live in California. It’s not as much fun as you might think,” Michael said. “So he came back, and he realized we were building something and he wanted to be part of it.”

Michael thinks in decades, because those are the terms of his leases.

“Our son is with us now, and he’ll be here for the next 10 years,” Michael said.