Twenty Years in the Heart of the Blue Mountains

A story of two families, one village, and the belief that feeding people is one of the most important things a person can do.

Andrew Tsaroumis

March 2026 · 5 min read

"When someone cooks for you, they are saying something. They are telling you about themselves: where they come from, who they are, what makes them happy."

— Anthony Bourdain

Before the café

This story does not begin in 2006. It begins in Greece, in the late 1950s, when two families made the same decision to leave the country they knew and build a new life in Australia.

Dora's family settled in Cowra, where her parents opened the Gardenia Café in the 1960s. My family did the same across the state: milk bars, fruit shops, liquor stores and cafes.

Different towns. The same instinct. To feed people. To welcome them. To build places where people felt comfortable walking in the door.

Two families who never knew each other until their children found each other decades later. And on 20 March 2006, Dora and I started our journey.

From Loaves and Dishes to Cafe Leura.

To understand Café Leura, you need to understand one word. Filoxenia: the Greek tradition of treating strangers as family. It wasn't a philosophy we chose for the café. It was simply the way we had been raised. So we brought it to Leura. We trained our team to treat each other like family, so they could treat every guest the same way. We built a place where a regular knew their coffee would be ready, where a visitor felt like a local, where a stranger could sit alone and not feel alone.

The renovation

Then came 2020. Like every hospitality business, we suddenly faced something completely unknown. The café closed. And with it quiet, I decided to do some maintenance. The kitchen was tired. I asked my builder to take a look.

He walked through and said, almost casually: "You should probably just rip the whole floor up." So I did. What started as a small repair became something much larger. At one point Dora walked in, looked around at the destruction and asked: "There's nothing left. What are you designing?"

I had an idea. I wanted to put the coffee machine at the front. She paused, then asked the obvious question: "And who is going to design this?" She looked at me and said: "Call your cousin."

So I called George. He arrived and walked through the space slowly, looking up. Then he said: "The ceiling. We need to drop the ceiling." He wanted to create what he called an expanse of wonder and beauty. Not decoration. Something that made a person stop and feel that they had arrived somewhere worth being. He drew on everything he loved: the retro pieces, the industrial textures, the warmth of timber, the charm of the old Greek cafés that had always been our quiet reference. The space that emerged carried everything old inside something new.

What it has always been about

Twenty years on, Café Leura has become part of the rhythm of this community. Couples who came in young have returned with families of their own. Locals who moved away come straight here on visits, as if checking in with an old friend. Visitors who discovered it on a holiday write to say they are coming back for the table, for the coffee, for the feeling.

Through all of it, one belief has remained constant. Hospitality, when it is done well, brings people together. A smile. A greeting. A shared table. Music playing softly in the background.

Because in the end, it was never really about coffee or food. It was always about people connecting with people.

Andrew & Dora Tsaroumis · Founders, Café Leura · Est. 20 March 2006