Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - June 10, 2012, Winnipeg, Manitoba winnipegfreepress. com OUR WINNIPEG THIS CITY . OUR WEEKLY LOOK AT THE PULSE OF THE CITY A6 SUNDAY, JUNE 10, 2012 LIVING WORKING PLAYING DOWNTOWN L IKE the animals in the wild ( or the denizens of Wind in the Willows ) I, too, have my favourite path I've worn through the scrub. I'd rather walk than drive, so in my case, the weekly trek that takes me to my favourite spot to eat, pontificate ( though nearly swamped by a sea of lefties at my table) and do the Free Press Jumble contest leads me to the Ellice Cafe. My wife and I like to start Monday morning with a measured stroll that has us arriving just at the 8 a. m. opening, allowing us to snag our favourite table. I delight in watching others on their way to the salt mines while I whistle a happy tune. She's glad to have the day off with the last of the big spenders. Located across the street from the West End Cultural Centre, it features black- and- white photos of the way we were and always offers a warm welcome to all. And I do mean all. As the sign says - white- collar, blue- collar, no- collar, it doesn't matter. Tim, the manager, sees to that with a kind word or a verbal dig in the ribs if he thinks you can handle it. Remember the theme song for the TV show Cheers ? And its line " You wanna go where everybody knows your name"? That's the Ellice Cafe. Being a creature of habit - I prefer to think of it as a man who knows what he likes - the coffee is sometimes on the table as I sit down. And the breakfast special I love to tuck into is on its way without my having to point it out in the menu. Now I know bacon and eggs is bacon and eggs... but then the highest Winnipeg accolade is value for money. To top that, there is a loyalty program and a steady stream of deals, offers and entertainment to bring you back morning, afternoon and evening. In addition to our Monday breakfast, we also reward ourselves for finishing our Saturday Morning Show on CKUW at the University of Winnipeg by having breakfast there, and I never glance towards the door without seeing the spirit of the late Harry Lehotsky. It was partly due to his determination that the neighbourhood has what amounts to faith in action. Indeed, I once saw him giving Jack Ewatski, then chief of police, a piece of his mind in no uncertain terms. The chief may have blanched, but he listened like a man. So the least I can do is live in the neighbourhood and lift a knife and fork in support. Taller on radio, Ron Robinson can be heard Thursday on Pages and co- hosting the Saturday Morning Show with his wife, Carol McKibbon on CKUW- FM. By Ron Robinson Where EVERYONE knows your name - and your BREAKFAST Ellice Cafe is always full of cheer " I ' M living my dream!," says Chef Mandel Hitzer, 30, who recently opened Deer + Almond at Princess Street and McDermot Avenue in the Exchange. " I worked hard going through the ranks in kitchens, and it has always my dream to be a part of the Exchange." Deer + Almond ( written " plus" but pronounced " and") seems like a strange name for a restaurant. But Mandel means " almond" in German. " And the deer is a majestic creature. I've always loved the white- tailed deer of Manitoba." No, he's not serving venison... though he says it's coming one day. Right now, it's out of season and Hitzer tries to serve everything that's as local and fresh as possible. Though the restaurant is very new ( about two months open) and has barely advertised, its message is spreading electronically and by word of mouth and Hitzer says it has been pulling in good crowds. The ambiance is warm - there is great music and the 20 employees are, for the most part, old friends. This is as far from Hell's Kitchen as you can get - on purpose. Hitzer has experienced nasty, temperamental chefs at the helm. " I've had a hot pans thrown at me," he says. " I'm here every day, and I try to have as much fun as I can." So let's get to the grub. The 13 items on the dinner menu feature ingredients that mostly only foodies will have tried before. Take chicken cilanto with toasted chilies and Chinese vinegar, or potato and egg? ( yes, it has a question mark) with fresh horseradish and trout roe. Then there's pork belly with plum sauce, pickled pineapple and celery leaves. " I get so excited thinking about and eating food," says Hitzer, who waves his arms a lot when he speaks. As for prices? " I'd say it's super- cheap," says Hitzer, brown eyes dancing. " Look at this - quail! And our prices are from $ 5 to $ 16." It's a " small plate" restaurant. Each dish is intended for sharing, which allows for lots of taste- tripping. Hitzer has two giant passions: world travel and food. And the man's in pretty good shape for a chef who just loves to eat. " I just stay active," he smiles. Speaking of moving around, the young restaurant owner recently went to San Francisco on holiday, and had dinner at Mission Chinese Food. He liked the food so much he asked chef Danny Bowien if he could stay and work for a week - to cook and learn. He is a free spirit with the nerve of a businessman. Hitzer says he came from a good parental combination. His dad, Rolf Hitzer, is a real estate agent for Royal LePage and his mom, Penny Lang, is an artist in Vernon, B. C. " I got the best of both worlds. I am disciplined because of my dad and I am also free- spirited like my mom." But his greatest cooking inspiration came from his grandmother, Erna Hitzer. " She's an amazing cook!" says Hitzer. " I fell in love with the kitchen at age 14." Later, he apprenticed to Makoto Ono at Glutton's. " I also opened at Fresh Caf� on Corydon Avenue, which ended up in the Top 10 restaurants in Where magazine. And I worked with Norm Pastorin, the chef at the Grove, when we were both at Fazzo." Hitzer says his new restaurant has attracted a lot of other chefs, such as Alex Svenne from Bistro 7 � and Tristan Foucault from Peasant Cookery. And it's a natural for people in the arts and film business. " In fact, Malcolm McDowell came in when he was making a movie here," ( Home Alone 5 ). As for decor, it's modern - about as different from the famous old Princess Grill that used to be on that corner as you can imagine. There is one large multicoloured deer up on the stark charcoal walls and thick wooden cutting board- style tables. The chairs are comfy and there are tall stools along the bar, wrapping around to line the picture window looking out on busy Princess Street. That window is guaranteed to keep the solo diners wellentertained while their palates are being titillated. " I'm really excited to be a part of Winnipeg's dining scene," says Hitzer before zooming back into the dining room. He's often part of the entertainment, too. I F it's been said once, it's worth repeating 100,000 times: Small, independent businesses form the heart of any neighbourhood. Technically speaking, Winnipeg's downtown is not one neighbourhood. There are actually 11 different officially designated neighbourhoods inside our city's sprawling central business district. But downtown tends to exist as one place in the minds of many Winnipeggers, each with their own internal vision of what downtown is and what it's supposed to be. To roughly 70,000 people who travel downtown every weekday to work, go to school or attend some form of appointment, downtown is primarily a business district, in the same bland, largely faceless way as any other central business district is in any other North American city. To people who don't often go downtown but occasionally attend Jets games, concerts or arts events, downtown is an entertainment district that seems safer at some times of year - say, during July's Fringe Theatre Festival or the NHL hockey season - than it does at other times. To people who never go downtown, it's just an unpopulated expanse of cracked concrete, prone to street crime, best avoided and easily ignored. And to people who actually live downtown or simply love downtowns in general, it is the most important piece of Winnipeg - the barometer of the health of the city overall, the only place worth being, for better and for worse. These visions of downtown are not mutually exclusive. But they do engender different ways of valuing what exists downtown right now and what should exist there in the future. First and foremost, downtown needs people. While there are sizeable numbers within the highrises of Broadway- Assiniboine and Central Park, reasonable density in Colony and a growing population in the Exchange District, much of downtown remains almost devoid of residential development. There has been widespread agreement for years about the need to increase this population and some modest successes in the form of new condominium and apartment creation. But if people are a downtown's lifeblood, then small businesses form its beating heart, even though the major institutions - banks, the University of Winnipeg and government offices among them - form the primary daytime draw. For decades, as downtown Winnipeg stagnated, it was easy for small businesses to eke out an existence in older mixed- use buildings, thanks to cheap rent and the slow pace of development. But there is now upward pressure on real estate in many areas of downtown. And that means some of those small businesses are doomed. In Chinatown, a downtown neighbourhood that barely continues to function as a neighbourhood, decades of disinterest at city hall and outright neglect among property owners have toppled historic warehouse building after historic warehouse building, just outside the boundaries of the Exchange. Some time over the next few years, the Chinatown Development Corporation will ironically demolish the 139- year- old Coronation Block and deprive King Street of its most famous facade - the Shanghai Restaurant, which closed at the end of 2010 as the family business ran out of family members to run the business. In Portage- Ellice, it will only be a matter of months or weeks before the Longboat Development Corporation demolishes the Norlyn Building on Hargrave Street to make way for the parkade that will serve its 311 Portage at Centrepoint complex. The collateral damage will be the Wagon Wheel Lunch, one of Western Canada's last remaining authentic diners, which has operated as a lunch counter since the late 1950s. Finally, in South Portage, a private land- assembly effort appears to be underway at the southwest corner of Main Street and St. Mary Avenue, where three of the city's oldest mixed- use buildings - the Fortune Block, MacDonald Block and Winnipeg Hotel - stand out as an island of dilapidated history. If this effort is successful, this patch of properties could be home to a new, significant residential development, almost in the shadow of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. But the demolition of the Fortune Block would also mean the end of Times Change( d) High & Lonesome Club, easily one of the best live- music venues in the city and arguably the best at creating a sense of community it inspires among its clientele. In Chinatown, the Coronation Block is eyed for a future apartment building for seniors. This is a laudable goal. In Portage- Ellice, the Norlyn Building is going down in the service of a $ 75- million development that will also include a new high- end hotel and office space, both of which will generate property- tax revenue earmarked to spruce up streets around the MTS Centre. This, too, is a laudable goal. And if the South Portage development materializes on Main Street, downtown will have more people and more density. Again, laudable goal. The bloody obvious question, however, is why must existing buildings be demolished in the name of development in downtown Winnipeg when there are so many surface- parking lots sitting empty across the area? The short answer is economics: Owners of surface lots make a lot of money off parking and don't need to spend much to continue to rake in that revenue. Older buildings, meanwhile, are expensive to maintain and extremely expensive to renovate. So when property values rise, it's easier to knock ' em down and build something new on the site. Without some form of redevelopment incentive, such as heritage or downtown housing grants, any old, neglected downtown Winnipeg building is simply a pile of bricks waiting to be demolished. Surface lots, however, are not going anywhere, unless they happen to be owned by the city, province or a Crown corporation. There are no incentives for parking lot owners to build up on their lands and no penalties for leaving them the way they are. Incentives to develop surface lots, promised by Mayor Sam Katz during the 2010 election campaign, are not ready to roll. And there is no political will at city hall to add a stick to this theoretical carrot. And even if incentives and penalties do materialize, they will be too late to convince developers to abandon existing demolition plans and consider surface lots instead. It's been said before, but downtown Winnipeg has no overall plan, in the sense that the masterminds behind megaprojects, policy- makers in government and entrepreneurs both large and small are working in unison to improve the area. I do not believe every historic building can be saved from the wrecking ball or every funky, independent business can be ensured cheap rent in perpetuity. But the displacement of an existing good for a newer, more upscale good is the very definition of gentrification. It's probably too late for the Wagon Wheel and it may be too late for Times Change( d), but the redevelopment of our downtown need not come at the expense of every small entrepreneurial effort. bartley. kives@ freepress. mb. ca By Maureen Scurfield Deer + Almond JOY New Exchange restaurant takes a really fresh approach Demolition DERBY Do funky, independent businesses really have to be sacrificed in the name of downtown development? BARTLEY KIVES bartley. kives@ freepress. mb. ca PHOTOS BY WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Ron Robinson likes the inclusive spirit at the Ellice Cafe, where everyone is welcome. PHOTS BY KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Chef Mandel Hitzer says Deer + Almond has been pulling in good crowds. The decor inside Deer + Almond is modern, with comfortable chairs and tall stools at the bar. DAVID LIPNOWSKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES TOP: John Scoles' Times Change( d) may be a victim of redevelopment. ABOVE: Surface parking lots are in little danger of disappearing. KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES ;