Beach Memories: Reflecting on many of the Beach’s great restaurants

By GENE DOMAGALA

I was doing a story recently on a new restaurant opening up on Queen Street East when I noticed something about the restaurants in our area.

There is no written history of those restaurants. I then took it upon myself to rectify this.

We’ll start this by going back to 1989, which was 35 years ago, and see what was what. I looked up information about that year and found there were about 200 restaurants in the Beach and East End area.

I have to admit I rarely if ever have eaten in any of our most noted restaurants, so I will leave it to our local residents to let me know more information on the restaurants, types of food they serve and their owners.

We will keep those locations to Queen Street East for now, even though I know there are numerous great restaurants on Gerrard Street East, Kingston Road and Danforth Avenue to name but a few other streets.

I will say there are about 32 restaurants on Queen Street East that were around in 1989. Let’s see what you the readers answers are about these “food factories”.

What were your favourites? Send me your favourable or otherwise comments about restaurants you remember from that time.

These restaurants were of different types and included Chinese, Greek, Jamaican, Italian and other types of foods.

Of course there were hamburger restaurants, pizza places, Canadian, breakfast joints and more; pretty much every type of delicacies you can think of.

Queen Street East had restaurants that catered to every type of society in those days, and you (dear Beachers) were that society 35 years ago.

Many owners of these restaurants were residents who lived in the Beach for decades, some for all their lives. There were many different names of the restaurants and some were around for only a short time while others are still here.

For example, the Honey Bee which recently closed down was in business for more than 60 years.

Now, some of the restaurants were located where thousands of people could be guaranteed to gather – close to the old Woodbine racetrack when it was around.

There were two restaurants located across the street from the track and were frequented by all kinds of customers. There was Diamond Steak House on Queen Street East west of Coxwell Avenue, and there was the Mecca tavern on the east side of Coxwell.

The owner of the Mecca was Alex Christie, a person who did more volunteer work than any person I can remember for many charitable causes. The city even named the bandshell in Kew Gardens park after him.

There was also a popular restaurant named Lido’s in The Beach. It’s named after Lido Chilelli who founded and still runs the Beaches International Jazz Festival.

Of course we also have the legendary Garden Gate restaurant which is known far and wide as The Goof.

A lot of these restaurants held large numbers of people and were used for community meetings by many local groups. There were and are also restaurants that mostly served students from local schools as their main customers.

In my humble opinion, there was one of the best fish and chips restaurants in the entire city in the Beach and it was Nova Fish and Chips.

There was also a great family restaurant called Karas.

Other restaurants also featured entertainment as well, or they had dancing or comedy nights or other fun things going on.

Here are some names I’ve been made aware of and please let me know of others. There was Loon’s, The Parts Restaurant, the Beach Bar, the Beach Tree Café, Lake Breeze Restaurant, Il Fornelo and so many more.

As I said, I know very little of their menus and I would like to know more about them from you, dear readers. Please contact me through a note sent to Beach Metro Community News with any information you have to share.

I will also soon be finishing a story on a new restaurant that’s opening up in an historic area near Greenwood Avenue, and I will be patronizing that restaurant.

Please also remember that many great local restaurants did, and still do, advertise in Beach Metro Community News and I urge you to support our local businesses.