the-old-hamlin

title: “The Old Hamlin — Where I Learned Bread”

Every food story I have starts somewhere, and a lot of mine start at The Old Hamlin in Ludington, Michigan. I started working there in 1980, in my early teens, and I still visit whenever I’m back. The owners, Chris and Marsha Papadakos, are there every single day — Chris is getting on now, and he’s still behind that restaurant like he has been for half a century. They are two of the finest people I know, and this page is partly a thank-you.

It’s also where I first made French toast on bread that somebody had baked by hand that morning, which is a bigger deal than it sounds — see the French toast project, where the whole point is a loaf I still haven’t matched.

The bread came down from upstairs

Here’s the detail that made the place, and that shaped how I think about food to this day. The owner’s mother baked the bread and pies in the apartment directly above the restaurant. It came down to the line still warm. Not “artisan bread” as a marketing word — just bread the family made, upstairs, that day.

That was still going strong decades after I left. In a 2014 feature in the Mason County Press, Marsha said it plainly: “Our homemade bread is our number one thing. We can bake 24 loaves at once.” The kitchen turns out 24–30 loaves a day in the quiet season and 100–150 a day in summer. A restaurant that has been baking its own bread, in-house, for the better part of a century is a rarer thing every year, and I got to stand in one as a kid.

1942, 1929, and the honest version

The Old Hamlin will tell you it dates to 1929, and the sign says so. The honest, longer version is more interesting than the round number.

The line traces back to a lakeside place called the Castlewood, on the south bayou of Hamlin Lake — which is where the restaurant gets its name; the lake, not a person. The downtown restaurant on West Ludington Avenue — the one I worked in, the one that’s still there — is the one Pete Koikas established, and as best I know that was 1942. (You’ll also see the family’s “since 1929” and, in one state tourism listing, a flat “founded 1942.” I’m not going to pretend the paper trail is tidier than it is. When I’m next in Ludington I’ll ask Chris directly — though I’d rather spend that visit talking than fact-checking him.)

Koikas is a genuinely American story. He left Greece, came through New York around 1915, worked in restaurants for a few years, and built up to eight restaurants in Chicago before he wanted a quieter life and moved his family to Ludington. His son Ted Koikas ran it and eventually sold in 1967.

How the Papadakos family came to own it

This is where Chris and Marsha’s family enters, and it’s worth getting the order right because it’s a real immigrant-family story, not a founding myth.

1967 — the restaurant sells to Toula and Stanley Lekkas, with Toula’s brother Tom Papadakos. The same year, brothers George and Chris Papadakos arrive in Ludington — from Greece, speaking no English, taking ESL classes at Ludington High School — and start helping run the place.
1972 — Chris, Tom, and George take over the business.
1975 — Tom moves on; George and Chris become co-owners. This is the era I walked into in 1980.
1996 — George retires; Chris and Marsha buy the building next door and keep it going.

The family is from Stefania, in Lakonia — the Peloponnese, the southern finger of mainland Greece. That detail matters more than it looks, because it plugs a small Michigan restaurant straight into one of the great patterns of American food.

Why so many great American diners are Greek

If you’ve eaten at a family diner in Michigan, there’s a real chance it was Greek-owned, and that’s not a coincidence — it’s one of the best-documented immigrant stories in American food.

The Peloponnese was the main source region for Greek Detroit, and the draw was blunt: Henry Ford’s $5 day. Detroit’s Greek population went from a couple hundred around 1909 to well over ten thousand by 1930. The path into food was almost a template — confectionery, then lunchroom, then a full restaurant — because the work needed little English beyond the menu and every job could be filled by family. Dad in the kitchen, mom at the register, the kids waiting tables. A dishwasher watched the business, saved, and eventually bought out a tired owner — very often with a brother or a cousin. (It’s the same engine behind the Detroit coney island, spread by Greek and Macedonian immigrants; there are something like 500 coneys in Metro Detroit.)

Look at the Old Hamlin against that template and it hits nearly every point: a Peloponnesian village, arrival with no English, brothers buying in together (Tom, George, and Chris in 1972), a husband-and-wife operation, Greek dishes sharing the menu with American diner food. The one twist is timing — the Papadakos brothers are a 1967-wave family, the post-war resurgence rather than the 1910s first wave that built Greektown.

Ludington, and why 1980 was a strange year to arrive

Ludington is a lumber town that outlived its lumber. It was named for a lumberman, chartered in 1873, and after the sawmills went quiet its engine became the Pere Marquette carferries — the great steel boats that carried whole railroad trains across Lake Michigan. By the mid-1950s Ludington was the largest carferry port in the world.

Here’s the part that gives me a small chill in hindsight: I started at the Old Hamlin in 1980, which is the exact year the ICC granted permission to begin abandoning the cross-lake carferry routes. The town’s biggest employer was starting to wind down. Service contracted through the ’80s; the last of it was sold off, and the Badger only came back in 1992 as a tourist boat. So the Ludington I bused tables in was a town between identities — its industrial reason-for-being ending, its vacation-town future not yet arrived. The Old Hamlin just kept baking bread through all of it, which is its own kind of statement.

Why it belongs in a breakfast collection

Because it’s the source. The reason I care about hot bread, about a kitchen making its own instead of buying it in, about French toast being only as good as the loaf under it — I learned all of that at fourteen, carrying warm bread that came down a staircase from an apartment where somebody’s grandmother was baking.

If you’re ever in Ludington: 122 West Ludington Avenue, open for breakfast. Say hello to Chris and Marsha. Tell them the kid from 1980 sent you.

Back to Jeff’s Breakfast Favorites, or on to the French toast project that this restaurant started.

Sources & further reading

Kate Krieger, “Old Hamlin, serving homemade goodness since 1929,” Mason County Press, 30 Oct 2014 — the source for Marsha’s bread quote and the ownership timeline (its history section is family-told, so I’ve treated the dates as the family’s own account).
Obituary, Athanasios “Tom” Papadakos, Mason County Press, 4 Jan 2020 — the dated record of the family’s origin in Stefania, Lakonia, and the 1967 purchase.
History of Greek Americans in Metro Detroit and the documented confectionery→lunchroom→diner path — the wider pattern the Old Hamlin sits inside.
SS Badger / Pere Marquette carferry history — Ludington’s carferry era and the 1980 start of its abandonment.