Owner Christina Karagias still doesn’t quite understand how the breakfast burrito became the most popular item. “I’m a little bit shocked because I still just think it’s a strange food,” she said with a laugh. She recounts the legend her father told her about a customer who used to come in early in the mornings in the late 1970s. He was always in a hurry, and one morning, he asked for his breakfast to be rolled in a tortilla so he could eat it in the car on his way to work. Lucky Boy added the breakfast burrito to the menu, and the rest is history. It wasn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, the restaurant’s owners took a customer suggestion and turned it into a menu item. 

Lucky Boy in Pasadena, Calif., started as a small hamburger chain in 1961, but it’s now best known for its breakfast burritos, top right. (Jessica Castro/Special to SFGATE)
Lucky Boy in Pasadena, Calif., started as a small hamburger chain in 1961, but it’s now best known for its breakfast burritos, top right. (Jessica Castro/Special to SFGATE)

Karagias’ father, Tasos Karas Karagias, and uncle John Rellos immigrated from Greece having never worked in restaurants before. They were entrepreneurs at heart, Christina Karagias said, and when they saw a Lucky Boy burger joint for sale in the newspaper in 1961, they jumped on it. The original location was in South Gate in southern Los Angeles County and was based on a small chain in Texas that had operated in the ’50s. The men soon grew the restaurant to a second location in Pasadena — then added two more in the area by 1975. Tasos Karas Karagias died in 2015, but Rellos is now 95 years old and still visits the restaurant regularly. 

“They just loved the restaurant, and they loved what [the previous owner] had done,” Christina Karagias said. “I get a chill. It’s just a beautiful story.”

Today, it’s all about the burrito for the seven-day-a-week restaurant. About 70% of the day’s orders are breakfast burritos, according to longtime employee Guadalupe Cano, and about 12% are burgers, with the remaining 18% everything else. He estimates that they serve more than 2,000 burritos each weekend. Most of those are bacon burritos — he said they go through about 80 cases of bacon each week, with each case containing 25 pounds. 

Since the breakfast burrito was originally suggested by a customer all those years ago, the team has made it a habit to listen to customers’ regular orders. Most recently, they added what Karagias called George’s Special, which is carne asada on pita with french fries inside, topped with mustard and pico de gallo. It sounded weird, she thought, but they posted it on Facebook, and people loved it.

Karagias said people’s tastes have changed over the years, and the menu has had to shrink accordingly, especially as slightly-more-healthy eating has emerged as a culinary competitor. She said she keeps the chicken-fried steak on the menu even though it doesn’t sell that well anymore because certain people love it, but it might have to be removed soon. Lucky Boy used to have a beef dip on the menu as well, but it was discontinued a few years ago.

Customers are quick to give feedback on any changes, and Karagias said she hopes to use the company’s food truck, which is currently used for special events, one day to bring back old favorites or even new specials.

Cano has worked at Lucky Boy restaurants for 40 years, starting as a teenager and working his way up. These days, he does everything from cooking on the line to taking orders to working in the office. He’s put his kids through college and bought a house while working at Lucky Boy. “I like to make people happy, and here that’s very important for me,” he said.

While Cano’s 40-year tenure is impressive, he hasn’t been there the longest. Andreas Giannoulias, a relative of Karagias, has been working there for more than 50 years. Karagias said Lucky Boy has at least three people who have been with the company for more than 40 years and about six people who have been there for more than 20 years.

Still, the labor shortage in the restaurant industry has hit Lucky Boy, too. Lucky Boy used to be open until 2 a.m., but it reduced hours during the pandemic. Now, it can’t find the staff to keep it open that late, so it’s only open until midnight. The restaurant has had other struggles through the years — the Great Recession, a bad kitchen fire, COVID-19 — but Karagias jokes she’s “in the business of digestion,” and people always need to eat. She said she gets letters from all over the world from people who grew up with Lucky Boy, and that’s why she’s happy to give people the experience they’re nostalgic for. 

She said she doesn’t feel pressured to modernize the place, though she is considering finally ditching the old cash registers for a modern system, so she can do a better analysis of sales and conduct inventory more easily. Delivery apps are a hard no for the company, since the 30% cut is just too high; in fact, Lucky Boy sued Postmates back in 2021 for trademark infringement and unfair competition when the app advertised the product without the restaurant’s consent.

While Karagias doesn’t like the delivery apps, she had only positive things to say about Yelp, explaining that it helps keep the restaurant accountable. She said the hardest reviews to respond to are the ones that say the prices have gotten too high. Just this year, she noted, the breakfast burrito rose in price by almost a dollar during the height of the bird flu. When egg prices skyrocketed, it was barely enough to break even, but she said she’d never resort to using liquid eggs — each egg for the breakfast burrito is hand-cracked over the grill.

Karagias’ father and uncle never officially retired, and she jokes she probably never will either. The 66-year-old still has plenty of plans for the restaurant, and she wants to take care of her family. “I have two families,” she said. “I have my blood family and my restaurant family — and they’re all family.”