Stephanie Clark has closed her little shop on Broad Street and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s sad. Haute Cuisine’s tasteful jumble of pots and pans made me want to poke around in search of culinary inspiration and its tools — like marrow spoons and poussoirs for making my own sausages.
Among the towers of crockery and glass, I’ve had to resist the urge to put my hand on a strange young lady’s bottom to guard against her knocking something over.
It’s the sort of place I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Julia Child herself and hear her whoop: “Just the thing!”
In this age of sprawling malls and big-box stores like Soviet-era railway stations, shops like Stephanie’s must be sought out. But when found, they give visitors so much more than they buy.
And when they close for good, they take from us more than they sold.
I don’t think Stephanie’s place will remain vacant for long. It might not display pots and pans any more, but it will be a “useful” place, unlike Ian’s Jubilee Coffee Stop, which has crumbled and sagged since it was shut 13 or so years ago and has to be torn down now.
I remember going there, too, and being handed the best chocolate milkshake ever in a tall glass, and a generous refill in a cold-beaded metal shaker, by the big man himself. Ian’s might not have been haute cuisine, but it nourished many nurses from across the road who remember his shop as home.
Going out of business must be as hard for shopkeepers as it is for billionaire tycoons and magnates. My father found it hard giving up his medical practice. I hope to linger as long as I can in this, my last nook in the journalistic craft.
My father and I built nothing concrete — no towers, no golf courses — so have had nothing to leave in the hope that others will carry on where we left off. His patients found other doctors; those who’ve read some of my stuff can keep turning the page so long as there are pages — or navigate to other amusements on a computer.
People of energy and ambition who have spent so much time and expended such effort in building enterprises and empires or making fortunes and follies must hope that the enterprises they leave last, and that their fortunes they leave multiply.
They — even the spotty-faced adolescents inventing new electronic entertainments — probably think they have legacies to pass on, if not to heirs then to successors. They might expect honorary degrees, monuments or heritage plaques on the hovels they were born in.
Most of us, though, have modest achievements that we don’t expect to last and are not intended to last after we’re out of business and the shop is closed and windows papered over.
Some people seem upset that Ian’s coffee shop has been derelict and decrepit for so long. Some say it should be rebuilt in its original form.
Ian might have appreciated their sentiment, but this is not the age of coffee shops and chocolate milkshakes in tall glasses. It’s the age of cookie-cutter fast-food joints and lattés in paper cups.
In the new Oak Bay Beach Hotel, an effort has been made to recreate the Snug. Well, it doesn’t work for me.
And why should it? I’m happy to have begun my serious drinking in the dusty old place smelling of beer and stale cigarettes. My senses need no pampering by ersatz old-world charm — even if there is steak and kidney pudding on the menu.
And I’ll never be tempted to shop online. I’ll toe no line drawn for mere convenience.
It doesn’t matter if Ian remembered me, a schoolboy in short pants with my father’s stethoscope around my neck, when I visited. It’s enough that I remember him and what his place offered.
Stephanie might not remember an old fellow with a twitchy hand poking about her shop, but the old guy, and other visitors like him, will remember and be glad.
Fond memories are legacy enough for a business well done.
