Eleni Sokos, 36

Eleni Sokos' career has has not been a straight line. 

She founded and ran her own branding and marketing company. Along with her business/life partner, she opened a Mediterranean-themed cafe in downtown Bradenton. And, most recently, she was named CEO-in-waiting of Oysters Rock Hospitality, the parent company behind Anna Maria Oyster Bar. 

Photo by Mark Wemple

But Sokos isn’t necessarily afraid of doing things on curves. She did, after all, hike 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago trail in Spain in summer 2016. The first day of the journey, she recalled in a 2019 Business Observer story, was actually the hardest: it was soggy, hailing and 30 degrees. But making it up the steepest hill was a lifetime confidence builder. 

Sokos plans to incorporate that experience, and many other tasks and roles she’s taken along the way, into her role at Oysters Rock, which operates Café L’Europe on St. Armands Circle, in addition to six AMOB locations in Manatee and Sarasota counties and has some 400 employees. She joined the Bradenton-based company in October 2022 as director of brand strategy. She was promoted to executive vice president in March. 

Around that time, John Horne, the well-known founder and CEO of Oysters Rock — he opened the first AMOB in 1995 — began the process of slowing down and handing over more responsibility of running the company to Sokos. “She has that entrepreneurial spirit. She’s never-say-die and she just makes it work, and that’s what you have to have in this industry,” Horne told the Business Observer in May. “She’s also excellent at not kicking the can down the road. She’s great at making decisions.”

Sokos comes to the role with restaurant experience. Not only with Kefi Streetside Cafe in Bradenton, but with her family: her dad owned and operated Demetrios’ Pizza House in Bradenton for decades. 

Sokos, as she looks to grow into her role at ORH under Horne, credits her mentor, the late Johnette Isham, founding executive director of Realize Bradenton, a nonprofit dedicated to revitalizing the city, as a key life mentor. Isham helped Sokos land her first job, in marketing at The Ringling Museum in Sarasota. Isham, says Sokos, was also “an extremely effective business leader” who was able to find consensus in various groups. 

Another lesson Sokos learned from Isham: to dream big. Says Sokos: “Johnette was someone who created a world where anything was possible.”