You’d be hard-pressed to find a food industry professional with more going on than Nikki Glekas. As the founder and CEO of the Nikki Glekas Collective, Westport-based Nikki is involved in restaurants (the three food service locations at Chelsea Piers in Stamford plus the Beach Grill at Weed Beach), recreation (they provide the food and beverage for the ZStrict golf simulator) event spaces (Bank Street Events, The Loft at Chelsea Piers, and Stone Hill), event planning, event design/decor, catering, and entertainment (her YouTube series has 20K subscribers). “When I was younger, people discouraged me from having my hand in too many things. They said I should stick to one thing,” Nikki tells Westport Lifestyle. “But that's not me. Yes, I have a lot on my plate, but I manage it well.”
Her ambitious nature dates all the way back to her first job, as a corn-husker in a produce store at age 13. She worked in restaurants throughout her time in high school and at Rollins College in Florida. After graduation, she got a job at Nickelodeon in nearby Orlando, and eventually moved up to N.Y.C. In New York, she bartended on the side of her corporate job to make enough to live on. “I always liked it,” she says of the hospitality business. She met her now-husband while managing a club in Manhattan, and eventually they moved back to his native Stamford. (Nikki is from the Philadelphia area originally.) In Connecticut, Nikki worked for an event planner in Westport, until, in 2008, her husband and mother-in-law decided they wanted to open a restaurant themselves. Eos, their Greek restaurant in Stamford, became a second home. “I was the waitress, I was the hostess, my husband bartended, my mother-in-law was in the kitchen. I developed menus. I chatted with every person. I knew them by name. We kind of lived there,” Nikki says. The restaurant was successful from day one, and Nikki says it wasn’t long before customers started asking her for event planning services. With Nikki’s eclectic professional background, it was a natural fit. “I pulled all the elements together and started an event planning business right away. I think we did our first wedding two months after Eos opened,” she says. “The event part of the business came quick.”
Even with four kids (her daughter Zoe, her second born, was only six months old when Eos opened; son Nickolas and daughter Christina joined the family while she was working there), a bustling restaurant, and a thriving event planning business, Nikki still wasn’t done. In 2014, she bought Bank Street Events, adding an exclusive venue to her event planning services. In 2016, she and her team took over all the catering at Chelsea Piers in Stamford. From 2018 until 2024, she ran the snack bar, restaurant, and did all the events at the Noroton Yacht Club. In 2020, when COVID-19 hit and people were cooking at home, Nikki started sharing family recipes on YouTube, in the series Nikki’s Modern Mediterranean, which now has hundreds of episodes. Four years ago, she partnered with Weed Beach in Darien to operate the restaurant there. In 2022, the Nikki Glekas Collective was formally born—the slowed-down pace of the pandemic era gave Nikki some much-needed time to develop branding for all her endeavors. “I figured we needed an umbrella for everything to be under,” she says. Their focuses are events, catering, and lifestyle, but Nikki says there’s more to come. “I'm still trying to expand. I have more things that I want to build and conquer. I’m still growing.”
If you’re wondering what could possibly be left, Nikki says her end goal is a hospitality company. “I want to build a real legacy,” she says. “Something my kids would maybe one day want to join.”
That she’s striving to create something even bigger than the already-impressively-big empire she runs now speaks to Nikki’s true work ethic. “I really started from the bottom up, with no money,” says Nikki. “My husband Jimmy and I started this all on our own. The fact that I can give my kids a big beautiful home in Westport, a house on the water in Greece, take really great vacations… I never take it for granted. I really know it's because of the hard work.”
For more information on the Nikki Glekas Collective, visit nikkiglekascollective.com
"I have more things that I want to conquer. I’m still growing.”
“I want to build a real legacy."