Vinyls, Cooking, and Rock n’ Roll: The Universe of Ilias Skoulas

First published in FNL-Guide in March 2025

The summer of 1979, on Ilias Skoulas’ name day, when he was twelve years old, his father brought home a stereo amplifier, a turntable, and two vinyl records. The first was Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow and the second Donna Summer’s Bad Girls. That day marked the beginning of a magical journey through music, and today, filled with curiosity, I was invited to discover how it connects to his culinary mind and gastronomy.

Entering Ilias Skoulas’ living room, you are greeted by a replica of Slimer — for those unfamiliar, the green, gooey ghost from the Ghostbusters films. Slimer sits imposingly atop a sound system that, personally, is the most flawless I have ever seen in a home setup, with the word “home” suddenly feeling far too modest to describe it.

“I always start my day with music. If I don’t, it’s like I’m missing a vitamin,” he tells me. “Before turning on my coffee machine, I turn on the amplifier’s tubes to warm up. This sound system took me years and a lot of money to build. It’s not that I had spare cash to show off. Listening to music this way is a very solitary craft, much like cooking at a professional level. The speakers I’ve had since the late ’90s, but almost everything else you see, I acquired gradually during the COVID era. That’s when I started experimenting. I went through four or five amplifiers. Once you get a really good machine, you want every part of the system to match it, like a brigade. And in cooking, you can’t have someone flying through the hot kitchen, a mediocre pastry chef, a mediocre cold station chef, and a very strong head chef. It doesn’t work.”

He proudly shows me every piece of the system he has built. Dozens of vinyls line the shelves, while others are stacked on the floor, as is common in the home of any music lover who respects himself. “When I accidentally heard a tube amplifier, my whole philosophy changed,” he says, pointing to the “tube” Audio Note across from me. “After that, I sold every transistor amp I had and turned to analog sound. These tubes you see are new old stock. They’re new tubes left on the shelves of the American military industry, mostly. As you can imagine, we’ve reached the point of eccentricity,” he says with a smile.

“What do you want to listen to?” he asks. I tell him today I’m not the topic, and he grabs a CD from the shelf. In seconds, the first notes of Pink Floyd’s Cluster One fill the room, the sound astonishingly perfect. Incredible clarity at a volume rarely experienced at home. Is it the best guitar solo of all time? My question makes him stand. “I’d say two more,” he says, moving to a vinyl shelf. “This one, Hotel California, and the one you’ll hear in a moment,” he says, carefully picking up a record. He opens the turntable, and soon the needle scratches into Dire Straits’ Telegraph Road. We listened to the fourteen-minute track almost silently.

We sit around a large black table scattered with CDs, a copy of Prince’s biography, a yellow notebook with handwritten recipes, a laptop, and a plate of spinach rice. He has returned late from a lunch meeting that ran longer than expected. “This is me. I behave as if we’ve known each other for twenty years,” he says, taking his last bite. “At this table, I sit, listen to music, and write recipes. One thing feeds the other.”

Have you ever connected music with a specific dish?

“I think I’ve connected music more with cooking periods rather than specific dishes. During the Food Mafia era, for example, I listened to a lot of BB King. When I made the burgers for that place, I listened to George Thorogood’s electric blues. In 2021, when I was designing a Mexican dish, I listened a lot to the CARS. Not that it has anything to do with Mexico, but for some reason, I couldn’t listen to anything else at that time.”

Prompted by his early musical influences, I ask about Ronnie James Dio, and his eyes light up. He starts humming Catch The Rainbow and tells me Holy Diver is, for him, one of the most classic albums ever released. The conversation naturally shifts to Black Sabbath, and when I ask “Ozzy or Dio?” he stops me. “I have an opinion here,” he says. “I believe Heaven & Hell is the best album Black Sabbath ever released, but when you hear Ozzy’s metallic voice with Iommi’s guitar, everything stops there. Ozzy might not have the perfect voice, but that tone is the band’s trademark. I won’t hide that I queued for tickets to their last announced concert. Needless to say, there were 168,000 people in front of me.”

Are there perfect albums and perfect dishes?

“For me, there’s no ten out of ten. Anyone who says they’ve tasted a perfect dish of mine, I’d consider them contentious and biased. Every time someone has told me a dish is the best they’ve ever had, I’ve removed it from the menu. If I don’t see room for improvement, it messes with me psychologically. The same applies to music. Personally, there’s no perfect album. There’s always a point where you get bored, move on, or the artist added something to fill time. We all know that. Perfect tracks might exist, but albums, probably not.”

When you cook, do you listen to music?

“I don’t want to listen to music under bad conditions, and generally, I don’t like to be accompanied by music from a transistor radio or a phone. It annoys me. When I listen to music, I want to be present, and I don’t think it would help my work, anyway. Music can give you a rhythm, if you’re perhaps at a street food festival or a busy canteen, but in the kitchen, I need focus. I can’t, for example, listen to Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven and cook. Something would go wrong.”

Moving into more imaginative territory, I ask which artist he would take to dine at Mousourlou and Don’s, a question that seems to make him pause. “I’d take Rob Halford to Mousourlou, because he’s passionate and I really like Judas Priest. I think he’d love it there. To Don’s, I’d take my rockabilly crush, Poison Ivy, the guitarist from the Cramps. She’s from south LA, and I think she’d get exactly what I’m doing there. I make Californian-style burgers. Yes, I’d like to eat there with Ivy and Lux Interior, but since he passed away many years ago, let’s talk about the living.”

If you could cook backstage for your favorite band, which would it be and what would you prepare?

“My favorite band of all time is the Rolling Stones, but Mick Jagger hasn’t changed in sixty years — fifty kilos,” he says laughing. “I definitely wouldn’t make anything in the realm of junk food. Do they eat meat, by the way?” he wonders. “Let’s assume they do. I’d probably make finger food: a sweet potato gel like Peruvian causa, something bitter on top, maybe foie gras. On top, bottarga, plum jam, and some zest. Impressive bites, layered visually in blue, pink, and orange. I’d also make scallops. Pan-seared with ‘nduja to turn them red and served on crispy pork skin.”

Do you see common traits between a great musician and a great chef?

“I could talk for hours about that,” he replies quickly. “Cooking and music are closely tied to numbers. They’re basically numbers. In music, tempo is the start of everything. For example, how many times the bass drum hits in a minute. In professional cooking, you can’t just throw in as much salt or lemon as you want. Cooking is precise and measured. No matter how much people say I’m intense, anarchic, influential, whatever, when I cook, everything is technocratic and structured. I didn’t enter a kitchen throwing things in a pan to make something. That doesn’t work. That kind of cooking doesn’t exist, just like that kind of music doesn’t exist.”

What would be the soundtrack of Ilias Skoulas’ culinary career?

“There are many tracks. From the beginning to today, I have a few good moments but more bad ones. But they all had their charm. You know the problem in Greece? Everyone wants to look flawless — politicians, entrepreneurs, chefs claiming they do everything perfectly, never going wrong. That’s not true. Failures are welcome and good. They help us move forward. For example, the three months I spent at Psipsina before the place closed a week after I was fired. But those three months inside a kitchen, making all the seafood I imagined into a menu without cohesion, were fantastic. A menu like giving a guitar to the Dead Kennedys. I made tataki, ceviche, lasagna, even Caribbean shark fin. I baked cactus, had seaweed, tried everything. At that time, even Katrivesis hadn’t done ceviche,” he says playfully. “It was an uncontrolled creative process. Was it perfect? No. Surely something escaped. Back then, the soundtrack would’ve been The Coasters, Marvin Gaye, Supremes, Sam Cooke. Things like that.”

What was your most rock ‘n’ roll cooking moment?

“When the Greek consulate in San Francisco invited me to cook at a hotel to showcase Greek products. The evening was planned three or four months in advance, a nine-course tasting menu for a hundred guests. Just a week before, while I was ready to enter the kitchen, the US chefs’ union went on strike. They suggested canceling, but we couldn’t. Orders had been placed, people were charged. I started entirely alone in a 2,500-square-meter kitchen. I worked from seven in the morning until midnight, building everything step by step. Making stocks, chopping, preparing, like a western: The Train Will Whistle Three Times. Just waiting for the end. Then, fifteen minutes before starting amuse-bouches, five chefs who had been declared DJs came in — one from the Fairmont where the evening took place, others from nearby hotels. In the nick of time, the night was a complete success. I don’t think you’ll ever hear anything more rock in cooking.”

It’s now ten at night. Nearly three hours have passed, and the conversation doesn’t end. Music and food alternate in our discussion, and now Ilias brings a pot of pasta to the table. A little later, after I took the necessary photos, I head home reflecting. Ilias Skoulas keeps music at the core of his daily life, turning it into absolute acoustic luxury. I started my car stereo to complete the night’s soundtrack with something from the ’80s, but I turned it off immediately. I thought of his words. It was like listening to music from a transistor radio.