Photographs by Douglas Friedman

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Somebody once asked me what the restaurant business is like, and I said, ‘It’s like giving a dinner party every night,’ ” says Nicola Kotsoni, who owns the Village Italian stalwart Il Cantinori and Flatiron Greek restaurant Periyali with her husband, Steve Tzolis. “And I really like giving dinner parties.”

Growing up in a big family in Greece, people constantly rotated in and out of Kotsoni’s home. “In Greece, people are very hospitable. If somebody comes by and you’re about to have dinner, you insist they stay,” she says. At one of the couple’s other homes, in the medieval town of Patmos, Greece, Tzolis even keeps the door open so anyone is free to pop in. “Usually you don’t have anything to worry about, like burglars,” she says. “When people would wander in, Steve would ask them, ‘Do you want a drink?’ ”

When Kotsoni bought her 20-by-30-foot five-story Soho townhouse for $700,000 twenty years ago, she didn’t think she’d do a lot of entertaining. “The whole house was terrible!” she says, plus it felt small. She gutted the entire place, and turned the below-street-level bottom floor into a kitchen, filling it with tiles and a coffee table from Morocco and antiques from France and Italy. Then she found herself hosting parties for up to 100 people. Nine years ago, she extended the house twenty feet into the garden to accommodate more guests. “We entertain so much,” she says. “It’s a Greek thing.”

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• Table of Contents: May 15, 2012 issue of New York | Subscribe!