09/03/2026
Thank you for this Lonestar proud!
If you have ever driven Westheimer past the little white building with a lighthouse on the front of it, you have driven past the oldest restaurant in Houston.
It started in 1917, and not in Houston at all. A man named Theodosios Christofidis was selling fried fish sandwiches from a stand on the Galveston beachfront. He had come over from Greece, and somewhere along the way he decided the name he was born with was not the name he was going to do business under. He became Theodore Christie. The stand became Christie's.
In 1934 he moved inland and opened a real restaurant on South Main Street in Houston, three dining rooms of it. People came in for Gulf seafood and stayed a long while.
Theodore Christie had no children of his own to hand it to. What he had was a young Greek man named James Priovolos, hired on in the 1950s, who learned that restaurant from the inside out. In 1967 the old man agreed to sell him the whole thing, with one condition attached to it. The National Trust records how he put it: "I want you to change your last name, as I changed my last name."
So the young man did. James Priovolos went and made it legal and came back Jim Christie, and he ran that restaurant for the rest of his life.
Jim died in 2013. His widow owns it now, his daughter is the general manager, and her brothers and sisters are in it too. In 2024 the National Trust for Historic Preservation helped pay for new doors, new signage and neon repair. In 2025 the family marked one hundred and eight years.
Every one of them carries a name that a man invented for himself on a beach in Galveston, and then asked somebody else to carry on.
