Lunch in a Time Slip
As you can perhaps guess from various comments
here and there in these little 'scribbles', food was one of the main
pleasures of our two-week trip. The anticipation before each meal,
the decision about where to eat, and then of course the actual
enjoyment of the food itself ... it's hard to say which gave us the
most satisfaction. Before arriving in Vancouver, I had assumed that
because I had lived there for many years and Sadako was seeing the
place for the first time, our dining experiences would be quite
different - for her, everything would be new, but for me, it would be
visits to familiar places. As it turned out though, restaurants and
food shops had changed so much during the decade in which I had been
living in Japan, that I too found myself walking around in open-eyed
wonder; almost everything was completely new to me. So those
anticipations, decisions, and enjoyments were very much shared by
both of us. But one particular lunch we had one day was different ...
although a completely new experience for her, it was very familiar
for me ...
One morning we made a trip to a semi-industrial
area of the city, as I had to visit a shipping company to arrange the
forwarding to Japan of some boxes of books that I had left in storage
years ago. This business was finished just before noon, and we walked
through the rather barren streets of this district on the way back to
a main road where we could catch a bus 'home'. Here, among the rows
of old brick warehouses, I saw a sight which for me, was like a
vision from the past.
It was a small building sitting on a corner lot.
The white painted wood-framed structure was so old that it no longer
stood quite vertical, but leaned forward a little, as if pulled over
by the weight of two large round red 'Coca-Cola' buttons which hung
high up on the front wall. These old-fashioned icons bracketed the
faded sign which announced to the passerby that this was "Elsie's
Cafe". The moment I saw this place, I knew that we had to have lunch
there, but I was a little worried about Sadako; it obviously wasn't
going to be the cleanest restaurant we could find for lunch, and
she's quite a bit more fastidious than I ...
Seeing that word 'Cafe', please don't imagine
'cafe' in the European sense, but rather as simply a short form of
the word 'cafeteria'. This was no elegant place to sit and sip
espresso, but a working men's cafe, the sort of place the English
refer to as a 'Transport Caff', and the Americans as a 'diner'.
Stationed here among the warehouses, it no doubt served up breakfast
and lunch each day to the men working in the area.
It had been many years since I had eaten in such a
place, but at different times in my life, I had taken most of my
meals in cafes just like this. I knew exactly what we would see
inside - in the centre of the room a horseshoe-shaped counter with
red-topped stools arrayed around it, along one wall a half dozen
booths, and up on one wall a menu board made of some kind of grooved
black material in which white letters were arranged to spell out the
'Daily Specials'. There would be a 'Silex' type coffee machine
somewhere, and plenty of those glass sugar dispensers with the little
flip tops that pour out a spoonful at a time. Battered menus would
stand in metal holders at intervals along the counter, and if we were
very very lucky, at the back of each of the booths would be a juke
box controller, with page after page of song titles to browse through
...
Sadako agreed to give it a try, her misgivings
about the general appearance of the place mitigated a bit no doubt by
my visible enthusiasm, and we went inside. It was almost exactly as I
had imagined; unfortunately no juke box, but everything else was
perfectly in place, and all complete with a coating of grime. As all
during our two-week trip we had been eating good breakfasts and solid
dinners, leaving lunch as just a small 'nibble' to tide us over, we
weren't looking for a full meal. So we passed over the Daily Special,
and chose instead from the list of burgers and sandwiches on the
menu: Denver ... BLT ... Clubhouse ... Sadako ordered a toasted bacon
and lettuce, and I a grilled cheese, and while we waited for them to
be prepared I tried to count how many years it had been since I last
ate such a thing ... about twelve or more.
There was certainly no 'caffe latte' on the menu
here, and when we asked for coffee we were served with thick china
mugs of a warm brown liquid that a devotee of the Tokyo coffee shop
scene might not recognize. Considering that at 70 cents it was almost
exactly one tenth the price of a standard Tokyo coffee, that's
perhaps not a surprise. It tasted fine though, as did the sandwiches.
Sadako was intrigued by mine; the idea of a sandwich made with the
butter on the outside was new to her.
In a way I was a bit sad that this place wasn't
nearer to our hotel; I would have liked to come back and try a few
more things that I remembered. Maybe a cheese-burger, served
open-face with a fried egg on top, chips and gravy on the side. Not
the kind of thing I'd like to eat regularly ... but surely once a
decade wouldn't hurt ... I must admit though, that there was one
important thing missing from Elsie's Cafe - and that was Elsie! It
was a slightly bizarre experience. The building 'preserved' so well,
the menu still the same as it must have been for decades, the whole
ambience of the place frozen in time; and then presiding over these
things, an elderly gentleman from Hong Kong - a man from a completely
different world. I thought it better not to ask what had happened to
Elsie ...
When we got up to leave, he laboriously wrote down
the prices for our sandwiches and coffees on a scrap of paper and
then asked us for four dollars and eighty cents. We paid it with a
smile. After all, 390 yen (just about what a piece of toast would
have cost us back home) was a pretty good price for a half-hour ride
in a time machine!