Crystal Grill

The Crystal Grill, a popular restaurant with a long history in Greenwood, provided insight into Mississippi’s business history, the Greek culture of the Mississippi Delta, racial segregation, and the civil rights movement. As one of the oldest family-owned restaurants in the state, its history tells the story of a local business that actively resisted the comforts of corporate-run culinary experiences.

The building where the restaurant resided—on the corner of Lamar Street and Carrollton Avenue—was built in 1914 and once housed both the Lamar Hotel and the Elite Café, which Nick Apostle and Jim Liollio turned into the Crystal Grill in 1936. Briefly just a sandwich shop, within just three years the Crystal Grill was advertising twenty-four-hour service and air-conditioning.

The restaurant prospered early on, but Jim Liollio’s brother-in-law, Mike Ballas, was responsible for much of the success the restaurant later experienced. The son of Greek immigrants, Ballas was born in Pensacola, Florida, in 1918 and spent most of his youth with his family on the island of Skopelos in the Aegean Sea. At age eighteen, he moved to the Mississippi Delta and then served in the United States military during World War II. In 1949, after the war, Ballas married Deomi Liollio in Greece and returned to the Mississippi Delta to work at a restaurant in Clarksdale. In 1952 his brother-in-law, Jim Liollio, asked him to take over the Crystal Grill for a few months while he was out of town.

The Crystal Grill grew dramatically under Ballas’s command while his brother-in-law was away. Ballas expanded the dining area and kitchen by purchasing the lobby of the Lamar Hotel and built new booths, improved the quality of seafood and meat, and began presenting meals on new Shenango china. Within three months of Ballas’s command, the restaurant’s profits more than doubled. Ballas eventually bought out his brother-in-law’s business partner, Nick Apostle, leaving Mike and Jim the sole proprietors, and together they continued to expand the restaurant. Although Ballas renovated areas of the building, some of the original tile from 1914 was still visible in one of the main dining rooms more than a hundred years later.

The Crystal Grill became the whites-only Crystal Club after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Crystal Club required a membership key for admission, which cost a single dollar and was only granted to white patrons. Greenwood’s mayor at the time, Charles E. Sampson, was a staunch segregationist, and he threatened economic ruin to businesses that voluntarily integrated, so Ballas and his partner followed the path of other local restaurants and became a “club.” The restaurant did not open to the public for about ten years. Upon ending the “club” status, the restaurant returned as the Crystal Grill and openly served all customers.

Mike’s son, John Mike “Johnny” Ballas, began working at his father’s restaurant as a child. He became a full-time employee in 1974 after graduating from Mississippi State University. When Jim Liollio retired in 1977 Mike and Johnny Ballas again expanded the Crystal Grill, adding a new skylight dining area. With the completion of this latest expansion, the restaurant had more than two hundred seats to accommodate its patrons.

The menu of the Crystal Grill was diverse. Mike Ballas taught himself how to cook using cookbooks and his own experimentation, and the menu ranged from traditional southern cuisine to American Italian, each with the Ballas’s Greek flair. The Ballas’s Greek heritage was especially evident in the salmon salad and seafood seasonings. The Crystal Grill was also well known for freshly made yeast rolls and “mile-high pie.” The yeast rolls came from a recipe borrowed from Johnny’s home economics teacher. The recipe for the “mile-high pie”— characterized by tall merengue and mastered by Mike Ballas in the 1940s—remained a family secret.

Mike Ballas passed away in 2015, and his son Johnny gained full control of the restaurant, serving both new and regular customers. Sunday was a particularly busy day for the Crystal Grill. When dining, one was presented with a “Four Faiths” place mat. The place mat had a Catholic, Jewish, Orthodox, and Protestant prayer, so people of various faiths could bless their meal. The restaurant continued to serve as a cornerstone of Mississippi family-owned business, Delta history, and the ever-changing nature of southern cuisine until the Ballas family announced that the restaurant would close on 9 July 2024.