Lucky's, by Andrew Pippos, is a story of Greek food and thwarted dreams

His first opportunity was writing album reviews for street magazine BMA, and now his debut novel Lucky's is the realisation of his oldest and most consistent ambition.

It's a book that brings together two preoccupations of his life: food and stories. The novel blends several themes to tell a tale about Greek migrants who came to Australia and enriched the flavour of our culture.

The titular character is a trickster who establishes a chain of cafes. Lucky's story is one reflection on the diner-cafe culture that arrived with the wave of new settlers from the Mediterranean in the first half of the 20th century.

"The novel features many lanes of narrative, but they all converge," says Pippos over the phone from his home in Sydney. "And they all converge at the site of a café franchise called Lucky's."

Pippos's novel might be described as a multi-generational saga: it spans about 80 years. "I wanted to show how characters change over the course of a life," he says. "I wanted to show how a culture changes."

It took Pippos eight years to write the story, although one suspects it might have been simmering since his days growing up in Canberra.

He's always been a voracious reader, and that informed his career path through university and into journalism.

"I wanted to write a novel almost from the time I started reading novels," he says. 'I was converted to the art-form by my love for it.'

Writing is a skill he has honed through publication, sub-editing newspapers in Sydney and London and now tutoring the next generation of writers at the University of Technology Sydney.

"I did a typical apprenticeship of sorts, by producing short stories and articles and book reviews."

Now the proverbial shoe is on the other foot, as Pippos himself has been speaking for weeks about his own work.

"There's been a bit of print, a couple of radio interviews, podcasts. You go from not talking about it, to a bit, to doing a lot."

Recently Andrew was interviewed by To Vima, which he describes as Greece's Herald newspaper, and he was surprised by some of the questions. "The journalist hadn't heard about the old Greek cafes of Australia," he says. "He didn't know about the assimilation era. There are gaps in the understanding of the Greek diaspora."

While Lucky's is a network of multiple stories, the subject of migration is central to the book, and helps develop the novel's broader interest in how the past tumbles into the future.

A charming author's note at the end of the novel describes the invention of the Pippos family name on the Greek island of Ithaka.

"The story goes that in the 18^th century, a man with the surname Asproyerakas left his home in southern Kefalonia and settled in the village of Vathi on the neighbouring island of Ithaka. In Vathi, he acquired the nickname Pippos because he had a habit of calling out pip-pip-pip while feeding his brace of ducks."

As well as being the Pippos home, Ithaka is famed as the kingdom of Odysseus and central to the epic Odyssey by Homer.

At one point, the family operated a number of cafes in country NSW, but the original café was in the town of Brewarrina, where Pippos was a frequent visitor. "The café is gone now," he says. "The trajectory of the Greek café phenomenon is complete. It's a lost world."

Like many cafes of the assimilation era, the Pippos' did not serve Greek food. Instead they offered popular Anglo dishes, such as mixed grills and steaks. In the kitchen, Greek food was prepared for family meals.

"After closing time we had enormous and unforgettable meals," Pippos says. "My grandparents and uncles and aunts were professional cooks but they could not sell the food they cooked best. In my novel, I've tried to address that tension, that compromise. I'm interested in the price the Café Greeks paid for settlement.

"At home I cook the Greek dishes they cooked for me. That was how they kept their ethnicity alive. I want to keep that tradition alive, too."

Food features in unexpected places, such as a memorable scene where cafe owner Achilles Asproyerakas settles a fight between two patrons with a wooden club.

"Achilles uttered the word 'Youvarlakia' (meatballs in lemon sauce), as he brought the weapon down on the man's knee, making the sound of a stick across a ball. It was the other man's turn again. He took the club around his middle. 'Youvarlakia!' Achilles said again. A marvellous dish he couldn't place on the menu because Australians wouldn't order it."

It's unsurprising that another legacy of the Cafe Greeks was storytelling: specifically, a kind of dinner-table storytelling that would shift from Greek myths to migration stories to local gossip. "The island of Ithaka was a place of intersection in that mix," says Pippos. "The island existed in myth and literature and it was also a very real place that my relatives gossiped about."

It's these overlapping layers of personal observation and fact that give depth to Pippos' writing, from Canberra's BMA Magazine, to his work in the journal Meanjin at the tender age of 21.

In recent years, a reflection on his time at Marist College in light of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse was published in the Sydney Review of Books and balances details revealed through that process and his own observations of the perpetrator.

"I always knew writing a novel would be a long road," he says.

"In the eight years it took to write this novel there were many upheavals: leaving the newsroom for the university, losing my father, having a daughter, and completing a doctorate.

"And to write such an ambitious novel meant I had to become a different person. I had to grow up and learn more about love and family and despair and loss. And I had to get better at writing."

He says the drafting process was both following a plan, and seeing the novel reveal itself.

"My original aims did not change. I wanted to write about people striving and responding to failure and success. I wanted to write about the Greek café milieu. And in the end that's what I did," he says.

"But some aspects of the plot changed. One of the most important characters didn't appear until four years into the book. There were periods when I was lost. Some writers walk away from projects that become too big.

"It's like a boat you're building in your backyard. You'd go out there and tinker and not be sure if it was going to sail. But I was committed to the project - the manuscript became like a friend to me. By the end it was hard to let go and send it to a publisher."

Lucky's has been widely praised by critics. It was the Dymocks Book of the Month for November, and is now the focus of "NSW Reads Lucky's" initiative, a state-wide book club run by 360 public libraries in NSW.

Pippos says he'll now turn his attention to writing non-fiction. It's easy to imagine that he's building a new ship and preparing to embark on another journey.