Sunday, August 06, 2006

 

Tomato Cafe - Cambie & 17th Ave

As opposed to the high-flying Joey Tomato's, this restaurant has been around much longer - 15 years - and is very much, a laid back West Coast diner, whose mantra was fresh, healthy food. Originally opened by former Olympians, Diane and Doug Clement, they injected 'fresh and healthy' into this once-sleepy strip on Cambie.

In those intervening 15 years, this area has changed noticeably. For one thing, there's more restaurants now. There's even a Capers, a block away.

We used to wait for the bus in front. Instead there's a nice patio now. I remember there was a grocery store, where we bought our comic books and an old barber shop in the middle somewhere. The barber shop is still there, enveloped by the restaurant, which took up the space occupied by the grocery store and I think, the first store front at the end of the block.

There's a decent wine list, but I ordered a Timberwolf Pale Ale ($5), a rotisserie chicken sandwich ($7.75) and potato dill salad ($2.95). At its core, Tomato is still a laid back diner, maybe too laid back.

Late Sunday afternoon, with at least 4 waitresses, I noticed they were busy setting forks and spoons for the dinner trade, that they didn't seem to see all the people coming in.

In my mind's eye, I visualize the classic Jack Nicholson scene in Five Easy Pieces or was that Easy Rider, where he orders all the fixings, then one by one remove them all, just to piss off the waitress.

Then, thud, like a moon landing, my order arrived. It was good and I was satisfied.

It was good to come back to the old neighbourhood.

Comments:
Neighbourhoods, like the one where the Tomato Café is, do change, and we only really notice that they change when we re-visit them after a number of years. Do you find that when you re-visit an old neighbourhood, you are seeing two neighbourhoods – the one you remember, and the one as it is now?

Recently I went for a haircut at the Sorrento Barber Shop on East Hastings and Nanaimo that I regularly patronized over a quarter of a century ago when I worked in that area. As I explored that old neighbourhood I seemed to see walking along the sidewalks certain of my work colleagues from that time, and they looked exactly as they did all those years ago. But if they are alive they would of course look much different today, and some are dead. But I imagined greeting them as if no time had passed.

I’m older now than some of my colleagues and bosses who I thought really old then. But were I to see them now as they were then, I would still see them as old, and I would react to them, and feel in their presence, as if I was still the raw callow youth I was a quarter of a century and more ago.

Incidentally, East Hastings and Nanaimo is still much like it was twenty-five years ago, which may be why I kept seeing those ghosts from the past. And the Sorrento Barber Shop is exactly as it was, which is why I’ve decided to keep going back there for my haircuts.

It is the past, a different country , and things are done differently there.
 
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