And it’s bringing along its viral schnitzel sandwich that’s as big as your head.
It wasn’t even a conversation, Benji Terkalas says. He had to go to work.
Terkalas was just 14 years old. His grandmother worked at Navarra Venues, the longstanding Sydney functions and catering company. Footy season was over, she said. It was time.
“‘I have your uniform here. You start this Saturday,’ she told me. I didn’t understand at first but was eventually, like, ‘Alright, f—, let’s go, I guess,’” Terkalas says, whose sandwich chain, Kosta’s Takeaway, opens its first Brisbane store in February.
“That’s where it started and hospitality’s changed a lot since then. These days, I’m very grateful to have experienced it. There was a passion there — that true sense of hospitality.”
Terkalas perhaps does himself a disservice, because there’s a true sense of hospitality in Kosta’s Takeaway, which he founded in 2021 out the front of his father’s Rockdale smash repair shop.
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Kosta’s may not have looked like much from the outside, but Terkalas, by then in his late 20s, says he poured all of his experience and passion into this tiny hole-in-the-wall.
After those early days with Navarra, he opened Beejays, The Tuckshop and then high-end cafe LABLD, all in Marrickville in Sydney’s inner-west.
“LABLD worked but I just wasn’t passionate about it. It wasn’t me,” Terkalas says. “It turned me off the industry. I wasn’t sure if I had another venue in me. So I took a bit of a break, spent a lot of free time in restaurants that I loved and just sat in the background, maybe washing dishes — anything — just to fall in love with the industry again.”
Terkalas emerged from his funk into the maw of the pandemic. Inspired by Melbourne’s new wave of sandwich shops such as Hector’s Deli, he’d planned on opening his own shop in the city. But instead, his father suggested he take over the office of his smash repair shop.
“I asked him if he was taking the piss,” Terkalas says, laughing. “I called my designer, I called my architects. All the branding and graphic design work had been done by that point — and they were all, like, ‘Oh, this is a great idea. I love it. Let’s do it.’ And I said, ’Are you guys all f—ing mad?”
They weren’t mad. Kosta’s opened at Rockdale and was an immediate hit. Shops in Rosebery and Sydney city at Circular Quay, Elizabeth Street and Martin Place have since followed. Key to its success, beyond the service and neat branding? Chef-made sandwiches.
“I was very lucky because there weren’t restaurants open due to the pandemic, and a lot of my buddies were really good chefs. I told them, ‘Look, come and help me get this off the ground. I need some good people to execute this.’”
In those early days it was former Cornersmith chef Cameron Harris and Delicious magazine recipe writer Helena Moursellas; more recently Gabriel del Conti (previously group head chef at the Love Tilly Group’s Ragazzi and Dear Sainte Eloise) helped out on the Martin Street menu.
“We started curating some menus, we got a really good team together and, for us, it was not doing too much to the food and just serving some big hospitality just through a window at Rockdale.”
Now the window is coming to Brisbane, with Kosta’s Takeaway opening at Gasworks Plaza later this month.
“I’ve been watching the food scene in Brisbane for five or six years, and I’ve always enjoyed getting away there, eating at restaurant such as Hellenika and Gerard’s,” Terkalas says. “[Brisbane] has this real positivity too it; it makes feel young in the trade again.”
“We landed a site a little further up, but it didn’t quite feel right. And then Gasworks came up and I think it’s a great starter for us [in Brisbane]. I love what that precinct is about.”
Kosta’s at Gasworks will be a simple set up of a terracotta counter with a small seated area on one side for those who want to eat in.
Each Kosta’s menu has been a variation on the original, with its own special sandwiches, and Gasworks will be no different, but Kosta’s classics such as the salad schiacciata, tuna melt and, of course, the positively enormous panko-crumbed schnitzel sandwich with its house-secret VIP sauce will all be present and correct.
Bread is being produced to Kosta’s specs by The Bread Social and coffee comes from Canberra-based Ona.
“For the opening we’re doing a bit of a campaign,” Terkalas says. “The first day, we’re gonna do 100 sangers, the second day will be free coffee all day, and then the third day we’ve teamed up with Bread Social to give away doughnuts.”
Kosta’s Takeaway will open in Newstead mid-February.
Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
