A clump of feta, tucked in a salad of iceberg and cucumbers. A stipple of oregano on a broiled snapper fillet. A streusel of baklava atop a cheesecake. At the Bright Star in Bessemer, Ala., 13 miles southwest of Birmingham, the vestiges of Greece are few.

Greek immigrants built the Bright Star, a vintage dining hall of intricately patterned tile floors, nicotine-patinaed woodwork and brass chandeliers. It's a 300-seat behemoth of a restaurant, the civic and culinary anchor of a one-time industrial town, named for Henry Bessemer, the Brit who pioneered processes for forging pig iron into steel.

LOUIE FAVORITE/AJC (ENLARGE)

While most of the cooking fat used in the kitchen is bacon grease, restaurant co-owner Jimmy Koikos stays true to his Greek roots by adding a splash of olive oil to his meal.

LOUIE FAVORITE/AJC (ENLARGE)

Bright Star's Evelyn Rembert prepares corn bread muffins, which are usually served alongside pull-apart rolls.

LOUIE FAVORITE/AJC (ENLARGE)

Fried gulf red snapper, oven-roasted Greek potatoes, fresh turnip greens, fried okra and iced tea all make an appearance in this spread with a bit of Greek flavor at Bright Star in Bessemer, Ala.

Family photo (ENLARGE)

Eleni and Demitrios Koikos, parents of Bill Koikos, a Bright Star Cafe founder, circa 1927.

MORE INTERVIEWS John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. To read SFA interviews with Greek restaurateurs in Birmingham, go to the oral history section at www.southernfoodways.com. SAVING SOUTHERN FOOD THE WORLD AT OUR TABLE PART 3 Articles: • Oxford, Mississippi: A melting pot of flavors | Photos • Writer found Oxford's global cuisine a more comfortable fit Recipes: • Sukuma Na Nyama (Beef and Greens) • Pork and Sweet Potato Red Curry • Cucumber Kimchi Traveling to Mississippi? • Columbus, Miss.: A distinctive destination full of historic sites • Biloxi: Jefferson Davis house reopens after damage repaired Election 2008 • Oxford hosts the first of three 2008 presidential debates • Full election coverage: news, blogs, photos PART 2 Articles: • Taqueria del Sol: Mexico and Memphis meet in Atlanta | Photos • Horchata: New sweet tea for a multi-cultural South? Recipes: • Memphis Pork Tacos, Buttermilk Fried Chicken • Eddie's Turnip Greens • Jalapeno Coleslaw • Refried Black-Eyed Peas PART 1 Articles: • South is a melting pot of global cuisines • These Greeks don't pine for pita | Photos Recipes: • Greek-style Snapper • Spinach and rice casserole • Carrot and raisin salad • More Saving Southern Food recipes

Last year, the Bright Star turned 100. That means it's just two years younger than Galatoire's, the New Orleans restaurant of great renown and even greater souffle potatoes. Like Galatoire's, the Bright Star remains a family-focused enterprise.

Descendants of Bright Star founding fathers — 1906 arrival Tom Bonduris, a native of the farming village of Peleta in the mountainous Peloponnesus region, and his cousin, Bill Koikos, who followed from Peleta in 1920 — still work the floor each and every day.

But the Bright Star is not hyphenated. It's not Greek-Southern. Or even Greek-American. The restaurant and, more to the point, the family who owns it, have ceased pining for pita.

They are fully realized residents of the South, lifelong students of the crusty art of corn bread. And so is the long-tenured crew of cooks, waiters and busboys who work for present-day proprietors Jimmy Koikos, 69, and brother Nicky, seven years his junior.

"We got some olive oil back in the kitchen," says lead lunch cook Robert Moore, a veteran of nearly 25 years, a man home schooled in the traditions of soul food cookery. "We use that for our squash, but for everything else, bacon grease gets the job done."

Industry booms

Civic boosters once touted Birmingham as the Magic City, a reference to its boomtown industrial beginnings. Advocates of Bessemer dubbed their burg the Marvel City. Both places, birthed in the years following the Civil War, did not follow traditional Southern patterns, wherein a city grew wealthy by way of agricultural sales and commodity trading.

Instead, Bessemer and Birmingham built soot-belching furnaces and factories, heavy industrial enterprises that earned the area yet another nickname: "Pittsburgh of the South." And the promise of industry drew job-seekers. Some were farmers, born and bred Southerners who pastured their draft horses in exchange for paychecks and pensions.

Others, from beyond these shores, followed relatives who had already blazed a trail, in search of a shot at the American dream. Greek natives came in droves. Propelled by wars with Turkey and goaded by crop failures and bungled agricultural initiatives, more than 400,000 Greeks made landfall in America between 1890 and 1910, the proximate decades during which Bessemer and Birmingham muscled their way to industrial might.

Those industrial workers, many of whom arrived without spouses or children, clamored to wolf down lunch-break sandwiches from portable canteens, to dine in cafes, to drink and carouse in taverns. And Greek immigrants met those needs.

Their entrepreneurial motivations were many. The restaurant business required minimal startup capital and offered a great deal of liquidity, factors likely to appeal to new immigrants. And the chance to interact with the public across a counter, across a table, promised on-the-job lessons in English.

Or maybe it was all kismet, fueled by cousin-to-cousin connections, wherein each family hire abetted another.

No matter. Greeks quickly came to set the restaurant industry standard in Bessemer and Birmingham. Much the same proved true in other Southern cities. Like Columbia, where the Elite Epicurean Restaurant was much beloved. And Knoxville, where the Greek-founded steakhouse Regas still bakes the city's favorite red velvet cake.

Atlanta lacked Birmingham's density of Greek-owned restaurants, but it did boast the Peachtree Cafe, co-owned by Charles Keramidas, described in a 1911 directory as having "already given himself up to the melting pot." (In more recent years, the hash-slinging Majestic Diner on Ponce de Leon Avenue was in its heyday when owned by K.A. Kliossis. On the opposite end of the economic spectrum, Panos Karatassos, a proprietor of Kyma, today's haute Greek destination, is the man who sold 1970s-era Atlanta on battered and fried lobster tails and the art of fine dining.)

Keramidas' move to fold into the multiethnic whole was the rule. Adoption of the South's mores and cookery was an early imperative of Greek life in a region that was, for the longest time, famously inhospitable to outlanders. Most famously, in the early years of the 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan went on a xenophobic bender, intent upon running out "foreigners." Assimilation was the safe tack to take. And a diner counter or six-burner stove provided just the buffer a new immigrant required.

Embracing a new home

"Our mother belonged to both," says Nicky Koikos, the shorter and quieter of the brothers. "She went to the Greek Orthodox Church in Birmingham," he says, sipping a cup of coffee, watching the Bright Star lunch rush subside. "And the Episcopal Church in Bessemer."

Fried red snapper throats, priced at $10.75 and house-cut from whole gulf fish, were on the menu this day. Okra in a cornmeal crust, too. And field peas with snaps. And that odd marriage of angel hair cabbage and almost Russian dressing that devotees call John's slaw, in tribute to the Greek-owned Birmingham restaurant that popularized it. Not to mention corn bread and pull-apart rolls that arrived in a wicker basket.

That's a pretty typical lunch roster at the Bright Star. The sort of midday repast that, five decades before, Tasia Koikos, mother of Jimmy and Nicky, would have eaten after the Episcopal Church released Sunday morning parishioners into the Bessemer streets.

Those snapper throats owe a debt to Greek fishing acumen and frugality. But much of the rest of the menu reads like a greatest-hits playlist from the Southern farm-to-table soundtrack.

Tasia Koikos came of age in a day when Greek-born citizens of the American South were working hard to prove fidelity to their adopted home. They formed civic groups like the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association. ("Loyalty to the United States and love for its ideals" were, in the words of a 1931 newspaper account, the goals.)

These Hellenic sons and daughters tucked away recipes for olive oil-roasted leg of lamb. They cooked collards with fatback. And sweet potatoes slicked with butter and brown sugar. They learned to wrest smoky goodness from a cider vinegar-doused pork shoulder. They opened cafes with curious and somehow localized monikers such as Happy John Bollas's Barbecue Gardens.

They went native.

Not the old country

On this late winter day, Jim Middlebrook, a buyer and seller of heavy trucks who sat down to his first Bright Star meal in 1979, is eating beef short ribs. With sweet potatoes. And baby butter beans.

"I don't expect the black-eyed peas and the collard greens to be Greek," he says. "I expect them to be good. The snapper has some Greek in it. Personally, I like the Greek. But it's not for everybody."

Middlebrook takes a last swig of his sweet tea. He waves to Jimmy Koikos, seated, if only for a moment, at the bar. Jimmy worked the floor at lunch, wearing a pink button-down and a rep tie, directing dining room traffic like a Hartsfield vet. They did 400 covers today. With dinner yet to come.

With a colleague, Jimmy goes over the play-by-play of lunch service, taking note of which regulars were in attendance, what dishes were at their best. A wall-mounted television flashes with the latest presidential primary poll. He looks up for a moment, then readdresses his plate, forking in a mouthful of peas.

In due time, Jimmy Koikos will reach across the bar for a bottle of Pompeian olive oil, the fat of his fathers, his family stash. With a steady stream of extra-virgin, he will douse those ruby pickled beets, tucked alongside that slab of gravy-drenched country fried steak.

For now, though, his mouth is full of the South.