EAT ME

The Commodore Café

The Commodore Café has existed as a family-run business on Jasper Avenue since 1942. It’s beside Audreys Books and near the old CKUA studios. It’s something of an institution by virtue of its age. And it’s become something of a hipster destination too, perhaps because it’s evocative of a different era, a time when every main street in every prairie town featured a working man’s café specializing in CHINESE and WESTERN FOOD: fried egg sandwiches or chicken fried rice and egg rolls.

The Commodore is one of those places Ann and I have been meaning to get to. It’s closed on Mondays and otherwise shut after the lunch trade has dwindled. Its hours rarely coincide with our visits to Audreys. We finally got to the Commodore last Thursday with half an hour to spare. It occupies a narrow space, one surprisingly as long as my memory.

We selected a table near the entrance, against the wall with a view of the lunch counter and the working space behind it. Gum, breath mints and antacid pills were displayed on glass shelves in an enclosed case supporting the cash register. The wall opposite us green, olive drab. There were two empty wall-mounted display refrigerators, a line of Campbell’s soup tins atop one of them, and between them an erasable board with the day’s specials. The waitress had immediate access to a four-slice toaster, a milkshake mixer, a Bunn coffee machine and cans of chilled soft drinks. The lunch counter was split in two, a through passage to the tables. The top was brown Formica (possibly Arborite, a competing Canadian layered, laminated and wipeable product) with a darker wood grain pattern. The shiny silver stools were affixed to the floor. The colour of the seat coverings was designer plastic Band-Aid. Perhaps they exuded a rosier hue in a different age; I couldn’t remember.

I said to Ann, “I’ve been here before.”

“Really? When?”

When I moved to Edmonton in 1990, I found an apartment on 113 Street, steps, or the length of one strip mall and its parking lot, away from Jasper. I lived across the street from the Moto-rant, fine dining, and the Gas Pump, fine drinking. Still, I got around a little bit, I would’ve blown past the Commodore hundreds of times because dingy and sketchy didn’t constitute curb appeal.

“Nineteen seventy-five,” I said.

Or maybe 1974. Those were the summers when my divorced parents flew me west from Montreal at my big brother’s behest. Bob was nine years’ my senior. I know now that his intent was to provide me the sort of parental guidance my father, now living in Ottawa, could not; no one ever asked me if I’d prefer to live with my father or my mother. I landed my first real summer job in Montreal in 1976. After that my trips to Edmonton became shorter and less frequent (this pattern repeated itself with Ottawa weekend bus rides to visit my father). Bob died in 2012. It still hurts my heart knowing I’m now older than Bob ever was; we had a friendship like no other I’ve ever known, combustible, comedic and true. Blood, and mine without cancer markers. Christ.

Those first couple of summers Bob lived in a high-rise situated about halfway between the North Saskatchewan River flats and downtown up on the ridge. He went to work every day but tried to ensure I wasn’t entirely an instrument of the Devil. I attended a baseball camp at the creaky wooden ballpark (the current retro brick field on the same site wasn’t even a dream yet) beside the Rossdale Power Station down by the river. The camp was run by a couple of Edmonton Tigers, Class D players whose names I still can recall (they never made the Show) - American boys who roomed across the street from Bob’s one-bedroom where I bunked in the living room and who seemed much older and more worldly than me although, in retrospect, our age gap was less than the one separating me from my brother. Sometimes I’d see the Tigers instructors lounging in the sun outside their less palatial digs sipping A&W soda from orange and brown quart cartons. Even though they’d been teaching me fundamentals that morning, base running, cutoff throws, I never worked up the nerve to cross the street and say hello. And I often rode shotgun in a delivery truck driven by a teammate of Bob’s (hockey or softball, possibly flag football), delivering wholesale fruits and vegetables to places like the Commodore Café. Of course, I was frequently left to my own devices.

I walked uphill to downtown, passing the Ambassador Inn on my way to the main drag, Jasper Avenue. I generally turned right at the corner, following the descending street numbers. I had a route (this pattern repeated itself with Montreal’s downtown record stores). My first stop was Mike’s News to browse or buy music or sports magazines. The porn section was certainly eye opening. And I’d never seen so many newspapers from so many other places all in one place before. Beyond Mike’s was a bookshop whose name escapes me. I remember buying a novel there called Cross of Iron by Willi Heinrich. The film by Sam Peckinpah starring James Coburn and Maximilian Schell would make its cinematic debut in 1977. Heinrich’s prose would eventually direct me to H.H. Hirst, author of the Gunner Asch stories and Night of the Generals. There was a restaurant called the Carousel where I enjoyed the hamburgers. Its red and yellow sign suggested a graphic carnival ride. One of its neighbours was The Silk Hat whose name indicated every item on its menu was sure to be fifty cents too rich for my budget. Classy joint, ritzy. My U-turn point was Edmonton Centre, a newish downtown mall two blocks off Jasper, anchored by a Woodward’s, a now defunct department store chain from British Columbia that never expanded eastward beyond Alberta. Very exotic. Like all department stores in those days Woodward’s had a record department and that’s where I bought my first “current” Bob Dylan album, the Before the Flood double live set featuring The Band, his lone Asylum Records release.

I infrequently turned left on Jasper after leaving Bob’s apartment. That direction on the strip struck me as much less interesting to explore. Part of the reason for that impression was the railway bridge traversing the avenue’s dip at 109 Street. The elevated black steel band (not too long gone, by the way) barred the way, visually and psychologically. An A&W Drive-in (not a drive-thru) was just on the other side. I knew that’s where the ballplayers went, but it seemed a block too far – I love this, bear with me: Around the time of my Jasper wanderings to the left, Ann’s big brother Jim, closer to Bob’s age than mine, used to hang out at that A&W weekend nights, not for the burgers and root beer so much as skidding out of its pea gravel parking lot. Whoo!

There was never much to eat in Bob’s apartment. I don’t remember ever going grocery shopping although we must’ve visited Woodward’s Food Floor on occasion. One day, after having turned left on Jasper and being hungry I stopped in a café that promised CHINESE and WESTERN FOOD. I took a silver seat, maybe its covering was red, a stool away from the gap in the brown lunch counter marbled with fake wood grain. I was facing a dull green wall. I ordered a hot dog. Five minutes later I was presented with a perfectly grilled wiener quartered on a toasted hamburger bun. No ketchup, thank God, the lone condiment was sweet relish. I was too taken aback and too young to complain about the utter wrongness of my hot dog, the likes of which I’d never seen anywhere, not back home in Montreal the day before Mom’s shopping day, not even at Bob’s where we’d recently spooned egg salad out of a cereal bowl because there was no bread. I ate it. Tasted fine.

Ann ordered the traditional special, chicken fried rice, sweet and sour chicken balls and, a modern twist, spring rolls. Her meal came with tomato rice soup as a starter and butterscotch pudding for dessert. I contemplated the hot dog, but finally opted for a Denver on toasted rye with a side of house-made potato salad. It was good, all of it. And we ate the old-fashioned way in the Commodore Café, without pretence.                               

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