Konstantinos Vais‘s Greek-Australian restaurant essi did not start with a lease, a full dining room build-out, or a multi-year business plan. It started as a residency inside TT Liquor, a bar and events space in Shoreditch, launching on March 12, 2023, under its earlier name, esti. Vais used the arrangement the way a founder tests a concept before committing capital to it: low fixed overhead, a built-in venue and audience, and a defined runway to prove whether the food alone could carry the business.
It worked well enough that the venue changed its own plans around it. According to the company’s own performance figures from the residency, capacity utilization climbed from roughly 52 percent in the restaurant’s first operating month to 99 and then 100 percent by the height of summer, as a rooftop offering called the Greek Summer Cookout took hold. At its peak, the brand’s own account describes a waitlist of approximately 60 to 70 covers a week, a level of demand that pushed the residency well past its original end date. TT Liquor, for its part, later invested more than 150,000 pounds to install a retractable roof over its terrace, a move the brand credits directly to keeping the Cookout format running once colder weather arrived.
The Business Case Behind The Brand
“What I achieved with essi is unique. It is unique for two reasons, my old school hospitality and setting the best vibe, by being a present owner in the business. And secondly, using Australian ingredients to enhance already greek flavor profiles, like pepper, zest and herbs, with a Aussie flair,” says Konstantinos Vais, founder of essi. That is not simply a flavor pitch. It describes a specific operating decision: Vais staying on the floor as an active, present owner rather than stepping back once the concept was proven, at the same stage many founders hand daily operations to hired managers.
The brand’s social growth followed a similar arc during the same window, expanding from no public following to roughly 16,500 followers within its first year of operation, alongside a 4.8 rating built from 94 customer reviews at that point in the residency. Those figures reflect a snapshot from the TT Liquor period specifically, not an ongoing or current count, but they mark the moment the concept moved from a bet to a business with measurable pull.
The name behind that business changed along the way. In 2023, the brand was contacted by lawyers representing a multinational food company over rights to the name esti. Rather than commit to a prolonged legal dispute, Vais and his team rebranded to essi in 2024, a name the company has said translates to “you” in Greek, a decision framed internally as recognition that customers, not the founder alone, built the brand’s early following. It is an unusual origin story for a rename: not a rebrand chasing a new audience, but one forced by a trademark claim and turned into a piece of the brand’s own narrative.
By the time the TT Liquor chapter wound down, the deck the company used to document its own growth was already framing New York as its next stop, an ambition built directly on the momentum from London rather than a separate venture. Whether or not that specific expansion followed the timeline originally laid out, the underlying claim, that a single pop-up residency generated enough commercial proof to justify looking at a second market, is one the brand’s own operating numbers from that period support.
What the essi case shows is a specific and repeatable mechanism, not a vague success story. A founder with decades of hospitality background used a low-overhead residency structure to test demand, tracked capacity and waitlist figures closely enough to know exactly when the concept had outgrown its venue, and treated a legal setback over a name as a branding decision rather than a crisis. The commercial proof sits in the covers and capacity data from that period rather than in the setting it happened to occupy at the time. That is the part of his record Vais now points to as the clearest evidence of what he built.
