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Selfish Hospitality
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What if the most selfish thing you could do was also the most generous?

Selfish Hospitality is a memoir about twenty years in restaurants, a philosophy born on the floor, and the radical idea that the best service comes from people who aren’t afraid to admit they’re doing it for themselves too.

Selfish Hospitality Cover

The Book

At four years old, Demetri Gregorakis put on his mother’s dress, looked in the mirror, and for ten seconds felt like himself. Then the door opened. That feeling didn’t come back for twenty years.

Selfish Hospitality is the story of what happened in between—and what happened after. It’s about a kid who learned to read rooms because his survival depended on it, and then discovered that the same skill that kept him safe could make strangers feel like they belonged. It’s about opening a restaurant and losing everything. About addiction, recovery, and the long road back to a version of yourself you can actually stand. About the women who taught him what standards look like and the men who taught him what they cost.

It’s about the moment you realize that the thing everyone told you was “just a job” might actually be the most important work you’ve ever done.

This is not a how-to book. This is not a self-help book. This is one man’s honest account of what it costs to care deeply in an industry that doesn’t always care back—and why he’d do it all again.

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Photo of Author Demetri Gregorakis at Omakase Por Favor, 2024

Demetri Gregorakis has been in restaurants for over twenty years. Not behind a desk writing about restaurants.On the floor. Running food. Clearing plates. Training servers. Closing out registers at 1 AM. Holding it together on a 300-cover Saturday and falling apart in the parking lot after.

He’s been a busser, a server, a bartender, a sommelier, an owner, and a general manager. He opened Blackbird Kitchen+Bar in Sacramento and watched it become one of the most talked-about restaurants in the city. Then he watched it collapse—under the weight of his ego, his addiction, and his inability to ask for help. He lost the restaurant. He lost $160,000. He nearly lost himself.

He came back.

Not with a comeback story tied up in a bow. With an apron and a willingness to start over. He rebuilt his career at The Rind, learning standards and humility from a woman who demanded both. He managed Jayna Gyro, where he rediscovered why he fell in love with this work in the first place. He helped open Omakase Por Favor, where he finally learned how to show up for a team without setting himself on fire to prove he was worth something.

Born to Greek immigrant parents in Sacramento, Demetri grew up between two worlds—the warmth of a grandmother’s kitchen in Alonissos and the quiet loneliness of being different in a place that didn’t have a name for what he was. He learned to read people the way other kids learned to read books. He learned that the safest place in any room was the one where you were making someone else comfortable. And he learned that the thing that made him different—the hyperawareness, the emotional radar, the ability to become whoever a room needed—wasn’t a flaw. It was a gift.

Today he still works the floor. He still gets nervous before a rush. He still believes that how we treat people matters more than what we serve them.

Selfish Hospitality is his first book. He wrote it for every server, bartender, host, and line cook who’s ever been told they care too much about a job that doesn’t care about them. He wrote it because someone should have written it a long time ago. And nobody else was going to.

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“Hospitality isn’t about what you do—it’s about who you become while doing it.”— Demetri Gregorakis

Demetri Gregorakis serving Oysters at The Rind

You Already Know If This Is For You

You know what it feels like to give everything to a room full of strangers and drive home with nothing left for yourself. You know the high of a perfect service—that electric, untouchable feeling when every table is humming and you’re the reason why. You also know the crash. The Tuesday morning where you wonder if any of it matters.

It matters.

This book is for people who’ve been told they’re “too much”—too sensitive, too intense, too invested in work that other people don’t understand. It’s for anyone who’s ever felt invisible in their own life except when they’re taking care of someone else. It’s for the ones who stay late, who notice the thing nobody else notices, who carry the emotional weight of every shift and never get thanked for it.

You don’t need to be in the restaurant industry to feel this. You just need to be someone who gives.

If you’ve ever been told you care too much—welcome. You belong here.

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Free Guide - 5 Ways to Find Purpose in Serving Others

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