Veteran gourmand that you are, you probably understand that the right restaurant meal can be more than just surprising and satisfying. It can be transformational, changing everything you thought you knew about the routine business of tying on the feedbag. It’s also damn rare. But for me, strangely enough, it happened the very first time I entered the mystical realm of folded napkins and matching crockery.
The day was Feb. 26, 1963. I know this because my family had schlepped across town to the 16th Avenue N.W. location of Phil’s Pancake House in order to celebrate Shrove Tuesday with exotic chow and a live folksinger.
This was no ordinary six-stringer, however. It was Will Millar himself, soon to join the Irish Rovers and about to debut as host of a kid’s show on local TV (and, later still, open Calgary’s original Irish pub, The Unicorn — est. 1979 — where, for the first time under the parochial Alberta Liquor Control Board, it would actually be legal to stand up with a drink in your hand).
Preschooler that I was, I still vividly recall when Will paused right next to our table to drop the hit du jour “Puff The Magic Dragon.” But that gilded memory would ultimately be overshadowed by the festival of carbohydrates on my plate, a.k.a., Hawaiian Pancakes: silver-dollar-sized, bathed in chocolate syrup and whipped cream, with banana coins and a sprinkle of coconut. Dang.
For me, it would be a while before it got any better than that.
The world’s oldest restaurant is widely believed to be St. Peter Stiftskulinarium in Salzburg, Austria, astonishingly founded in 803 C.E. Spoiler alert: Calgary is not exactly in that bracket.
In fact, that original Phil’s might just qualify. According to current owner Melanie Petault, the core structure of the menu, including the pancake recipe, has been the same since 1960, though you’d also have to ignore the fact that, although sited on its original footprint, it’s different in almost every material regard, having been rebuilt in the 1980s.
Perhaps the Fairmont Palliser, formerly The Palliser Hotel (1914) deserves the title. Yet, how many variously named iterations of its dining rooms have occurred since then? There were great moments and top-quality foods, to be sure, but even old-timers are unlikely to remember a specific Palliser restaurant’s name prior to present iteration, the Hawthorn Dining Room & Bar. The hotel’s premier claim to coolness is, thus, its King’s Arms Tavern, which, in the ’60s became the city’s first de facto gay bar.
It’s useful to recall that, as in Salzburg, restaurants of the distant past were mostly the domain of travellers. In the case of the Canadian Pacific Railway-built Palliser, that meant train voyagers, ideally from the first-class cars since Canada’s unrivalled scenery had become the drawing card for aristocrats on romantic frontier tours. Stray too far from the station, however, and pickings got worse than slim.
Most early Calgarians were single men, here for work and little more. They lived in packed lodging houses where, for the lucky ones, there were nice ladies churning out meat and potatoes. Restaurants, such as there were any, operated on a sort of subscription basis that was essential for those lacking the means to cook or even store food. An 1888 advertisement in the Calgary Weekly Herald and Alberta Livestock Journal touted Delmonico Restaurant as a place where 21 meal tickets could be had for $6.50, and even offered “Fresh Oysters in all Styles.” Although one is tempted to think that, by contemporary standards, the food was bland and of low quality, early menus reveal remarkable variety, if not splendour. The advent of sealed-jar preserves and rail transport provided an unprecedented array of fruits and vegetables. Remember, too, that flavourless tomatoes and carrots had yet to be invented; all beef was grass-fed during the growing season and everything was organic.
Only as development exploded in the 20th century did restaurants proliferate. At first, they were inside or nearby a handful of downtown hotels. They were referred to simply as cafés or coffee shops, which is ironic, considering the actual java would certainly have been grim. Nevertheless, they offered a path for women to enter the workforce, often alongside Chinese men who staffed kitchens. Later, once wars and depression were in the rearview mirror, there at last came a burgeoning urban class who had the money and inclination to eat out regularly and even recreationally. Meanwhile, ex-Hong Kong entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to build eateries in emergent suburban locations and across small-town Canada, fronted by soon-to-be ubiquitous signage: “Chinese and Western Cuisine.” The latter included Denver omelettes and veal cutlets. The former, dry spareribs, fried rice and a sort of grey, beansprout-heavy abomination called chop suey. Chocolate milk served in glass dairy bottles made up for the questionable food.
But all that is virtually gone. If you like history, though, you can still get a visual taste at the circa-1960s-founded faux-Peking Forest Lawn diner formerly known as the Eastgate. Tellingly, though, it’s now Dragon Gate, Indian-managed, but still offering Chinese food with, despite the time-honoured sign outside, nary a clubhouse sandwich to be found.
It wasn’t until the 1950s that Calgary produced dining sophistication we can still enjoy. Fresh on the heels of our first oil skyscraper, the Barron Building, that would be Hy’s Steakhouse (1955). It set a lasting standard for classy business entertainment, including the centrepiece of every beef joint worthy of its highfalutin’ boasts: the flaming grill staffed by a tong-wielding wizard in a tall white hat.
Despite the contemporary feel of its current location in The Core Shopping Centre, Hy’s still serves up Mad Men classics like cheese toast for two, French onion soup and wedge salad. Although it’s hard to believe, the early days of Hy’s were martini-free, as licensed fine dining wasn’t allowed in Alberta until 1967.
Meanwhile, Hy’s little brother, Caesar’s (1972), still operates at its original location on 4th Avenue and 5th Street S.W., where the dark-toned, red leather decor appeals to anyone seeking a time-capsule vibe. Although it claims to be the home of the bloody Caesar, take that with a grain of celery salt. Believe what you will about the drink’s beginnings, but a reported east-coast U.S. concoction dubbed the “clamdigger” seems to pre-date the now-extinct Calgary Inn’s 1969 claim. Okay, fine. But let’s at least maintain that it never would have turned into Canada’s most popular cocktail without our prodigious drinking.
The Rat Pack age bequeathed another local legend, albeit at the far end of the status spectrum: Blackfoot Truckstop Diner (1956). Still sited at Calgary’s first truck stop in Inglewood (though now across the parking lot from the original Royalite service-bay location), it was established by the iconic Edna Taylor, whose famous 1.6-kilometre-high flapper pie still represents a Holy Grail for newly adult hipsters looking to eat their way off a Palm Bay cooler binge. Ownership has since changed, but the Blackfoot is suspended in amber — in a good way. The cook will still make you liver and onions, even if it’s not on the menu or on special, as it is once a week.
The late 1950s also ushered in the mode of snarfing that yet reigns: fast-food takeout. Barney Gelfand led the charge on Macleod Trail with the city’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken. Founder Harland Sanders himself came to bestow his blessing on what at that point was only his fifth location. The Colonel declared Gelfand his favourite franchisee in an age when it was deemed valuable to have the local operator put their name above title. Hence, Calgarians of a certain vintage considered it a matter for celebration on the rare occasion when mom brought home a bucket of “Barney’s chicken.” We now have 20 KFC locations pumping it out in Calgary, and, to be fair, the bird itself has changed little, though it seems to lack the cachet it once held.
What doesn’t want for celebrity is the genuinely fast food from a pair of Calgary legends still kicking it old-school. Chicken on the Way (1958) originated in Edmonton, where its name stemmed from a short-lived fleet of vans equipped with radios and deep fryers that literally cooked the order in front of your house. Frankly, that’s adorbs, if terrifying. Though they moved preparation indoors and expanded the menu, the Dunn family never messed with their holy trinity of chicken, fries and corn fritters. It’s odd that many Calgarians, usually without investigation, seem to revel in trashing the product. “Chicken on the Way to the hospital,” they’ll chide. Well, those people are wrong. The Way of Chicken remains sacred. Besides, the heart attack wants what the heart attack wants.
Then there’s Peters’ Drive-In (1962). Wrong-thinkers also like to throw shade at Peters’, as if generations of bus-propelled hockey teams and ski-trippers from the benighted flatlands do not consider it the greatest thing ever discovered on the Trans-Canada Highway. Sure, many modern burger artists are making undeniably superior versions, but Peters’ bestrides its own mountaintop on the drive-through front. The patties are chargrilled and, vitally, sauced. Buns are custom-made. The milkshakes contain, and always have, real fruit. How can you diss that?
One more fad from the 1960s was the revolving panoramic restaurant, still spinning atop the Calgary Tower. Another was destination dining — in Chinatown. Sure, much has turned over since then. Gone is the Golden Inn, where Ralph Klein and his cronies famously assembled after the bars closed, and where myth held that there was some act of kabuki that you could perform on your teapot that would signal waiters to discreetly fetch you a rye and ginger. What endures, however, is the Silver Dragon Restaurant (1966), one of few places where steaming dim sum carts weave among the circular tables. It was here that many Calgarians made their earliest acquaintance with family-style serving and stir-fries packed with crunchy, fresh vegetables — a critical component of good food that too many modern restaurants ignore.
And, as weird as it seems, in Calgary there once was no such thing as pizza — it bears noting that the 20th-century wave of Italian immigrants that transformed Bridgeland largely made their bones in concrete and construction, not restaurants. So, despite having a healthy Italian population, pizza was barely a thing here, though that changed with Tom’s House of Pizza (1963), now a three-location institution that continues to inspire fierce loyalty, particularly among south-siders. Give Tom Fowler credit for being decades ahead of his time in trumpeting not just the thinner crusts you see at modern joints, but also locally sourced, handmade components.
If ever you’re stumped when asked what constitutes Canadian cuisine, try this: All the cuisines. Around here, the 1970s marked the true dawn of a multicultural profusion we now take for granted. Newcomers from India via East Africa, for example, made an immediate and lasting impact. Consider the Taj Mahal (1973), our first exposure to the delights of butter chicken, curry beef and the almighty tandoor. Its lunch buffet, which features items that have been on the menu since the start, still stands as one of the city’s best. Likewise, Sukiyaki House (1976) entered the fray with a clean, meticulous style of eating previously inconceivable, including the revolutionary introduction of sushi. Super-trained Japanese chefs were always its hallmark. Today, they’re helmed by Osaka native Koji Kobayashi, professionally trained in the elevated form of Japanese fine dining known as kaiseki.
Immigration from Vietnam also swelled in the disco decade, though it would be a few years before that nation’s sublime cuisine captivated us for life. Early incarnations of the nhà hàng in Calgary are few and far between, but the Vietnamese community and our ravenous love for bún and pho abide.
The only possible rival is the contemporary casual steak house, now widespread, but embodied in antiquity by the likes of The Keg n’ Cleaver (1971), long the zenith of date-night perfection during its unfortunate diagonal-cedar-panelling phase. No wonder The Keg reinvents itself so often, much as former Macleod Trail icon Smuggler’s Inn (1974) did recently. Now just Smuggler’s, the new owners revamped an adjacent space in the rustic-modern fashion, but pass through a portico and you will recapture its never-to-fade glory, where, if 82 Captain Morgans are suddenly reincarnated, they can all have thrones. A new generation is now being beguiled by Smuggler’s timeless signature dish: prime rib with jus and horseradish.
All that, in a way, evolved from a previous faction that quietly built the restaurant firmament upon which we graze — the neighbourhood Greco-Canadian steak and pizza house.
Spiro’s Pizza & Greek Taverna (1969) remains the Athens of 17th Avenue S.W., still metaphorically smashing plates at age 55. Matador Pizza & Steakhouse (1976) celebrates its venerable roots in Varsity with throwback dishes and Shirley Temples for the kids.
But it’s the story of Nick’s Steakhouse & Pizza (1979), gazing imperiously on McMahon Stadium, that symbolizes the genre.
Nick Petros, penniless Greek immigrant (alas, departed), gets a job as a dishwasher at Hy’s, advances to maître’d. One day at JB’s Big Boy, he gets a crummy meal and chews out the boss, only to learn the joint is for sale. Boom. Nick bites down, repositions the grill, changes little and makes his regulars his friends.
Today, Nick’s son, Mark, grandson, Ben, and granddaughter, Annie, keep the eponymous patriarch’s effusive spirit wonderfully alive, yielding a reliable no-nonsense option where you might even run into Stampeders general manager and head coach Dave Dickenson and his staff war-gaming in the lounge, as coaching staffs before them have for the past 45 years. Get there three hours early on game day.
Good times, good times. So, what have we learned? Well, you are very old if you remember when these paragons of stick-to-itiveness were still adolescents. It also reveals how much living history can reside in what is, let’s face it, but a brief blip on the geologic time scale. Most importantly, when you boil it down to one abiding lesson, these restaurants all accomplished the same rare feat.
They. Stayed. In. Their. Lane.
It ain’t magic. Successful restaurants seem to be those that make the correct decision on what to offer starting on Day 1, or soon after. If you have that right idea, you could do it today. Maybe you’ll reach the centenarian status of Calgary’s single enduring item of continuously made deliciousness: the beloved savoury pies from the Bon Ton Meat Market (1921). Likely, you’ll gravitate toward the steak-and-kidney, except I’m going to steer you toward the under-regarded pork pie. It’s both awesome and way more old-timey.
