The B's knees

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Mr. B's owners Charlene Bachynski and Garth Sontag with giant RP Special pizza. (JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS) Photo Store

Sing for your supper

TWO years ago, we wrote a story about Pizza Place, a Winnipeg restaurant chain that, at the time, was celebrating its 50th anniversary.

Somewhere in the middle of the piece we mentioned Pizza Place's decades-old radio jingle, the one that starts, "I go to Pizza Place to get the flavour of Italy."

Last month, we were contacted by Bill Noble, an ex-Winnipegger who is on the hunt for the full lyrics to that tune.

"I grew up in Winnipeg during the '50s and '60s, enjoyed Pizza Place pizzas and their very clever jingle, sung to the tune of the Neapolitan song Funiculi Funiculá," Noble wrote from his home in Dunedin, New Zealand. "I now have a son-in-law who is an opera singer with the English National Opera (in London, England). I know he'd love to have a crack at the Pizza Place jingle, except I've forgotten the lyrics. I wonder if you would be able to send me the words, or, even better, an MP3 of the jingle."

Unfortunately, we don't remember how the song goes either. So here's hoping somebody reading this does. If you know the lyrics to the Pizza Place's theme song, email them to david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca and we'll forward them to Noble and his son-in-law.

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Mr. B's Pizza & Chicken (JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS) Photo Store

A few days before John Bachynski died in 2003, he sat down with his daughter, Charlene. John had been ill for years. He knew he only had a short time left. So he asked Charlene for one final favour: sell Mr. B's Pizza and Chicken, the Day Street restaurant he and his daughter had been running together for two decades.

"He told me to get rid of it; he said he wanted me to have a life and not be stuck there," says Charlene, who, at the time, was working full-time at an accounting firm and six nights a week at Mr. B's. After a lengthy discussion, Charlene gave in to her father's wishes. The next morning she contacted a real estate agent. One day later, John passed away. At which point Charlene decided there was no way she could part with her father's "baby."

"I was adopted and I think that's why I feel so much loyalty towards both of my parents," says Charlene, who presently runs Mr. B's, now located at 1783 Plessis Rd., with her business/life partner, Garth Sontag. "They gave me such a good life. Who knows what I would have gotten otherwise?"

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You might want to get out a map.

Charlene's paternal grandparents were born in Ukraine. When the Second World War broke out, they left that country for Canada. They got as far as France, where John Bachynski was born.

The Bachynskis eventually settled in Winnipeg's North End. But after John grew up and got married, he bought a house in Transcona -- which he bid adieu to when he moved to Australia, and later Japan, to operate KFC franchises.

A few years after John, his wife and their two children returned to Transcona, John announced that he had purchased a Niakwa Pizza outlet on Day Street. Two years later he changed the name to Mr. B's -- a tag hung on him by Charlene's childhood friends.

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When Garth signed on in 2003, he and Charlene expanded their menu to include steaks, seafood and pasta. But the restaurant's thin-crust pizzas continued to be its bread and butter.

"The same person has been making our crusts since Day 1; people tell us they're so flaky, they're almost like pastry," says Charlene, who taps her noggin when she is asked where her father's recipes are stored nowadays.

Here's a compliment: A few months after John opened up, owners of competing pizza chains in the area began approaching him, asking if he wanted to trade pies from time to time.

"The truth is, Dad didn't really like anybody else's (pizzas), but he was too nice to say no," Charlene says. "So every once in a while my brother and I would get all excited when he came home with a couple of pizzas -- until we opened the boxes and found out they weren't from Mr. B's."

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"I've never heard of this place."

Charlene and Garth got a lot of that after they changed addresses in April 2008.

"We're only five minutes from where we were for 25 years so I didn't really have an answer why people didn't know about us," Charlene says.

Now that Mr. B's is situated on a main drag, so to speak, it draws regulars from across Winnipeg, and from as far as Bird's Hill, Stonewall and Alberta.

"There's one couple from Edmonton that drops by whenever they're in town and orders 12 calzones, which they take home to freeze," says Charlene. "And there's another guy from Calgary who gets us to undercook a couple of pizzas, so that he can bake them later. He says that his wife won't let him through the door without Mr. B's."

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If you want to be a world-class crime fighter, you have to eat like a world-class crime fighter.

In 2006, California-based Ape Entertainment published Magnitude, a comic book set in Winnipeg "in the dying days of World War Three." The saga was written and illustrated by Greg Waller, a born-and-bred Transconite who has been chowing down at Mr. B's for 29 of his 37 years.

"I'd been going to B's for years and I wanted to honour them in some way," Waller says. "So in the back of one of my books I drew a fake, 1970s-style Hostess Fruit Pie ad, except I substituted Mr. B's pizzas for the Hostess pies."

After seeing the comic, Garth and Charlene decided they had no choice but to honour Waller right back.

"I was flattered beyond belief when they named a pizza after Magnitude," Waller says, referring to Mr. B's "Meat Magnitude," which is topped with seasoned beef, salami, pepperoni, Italian sausage and crumbled bacon. "It's an insane pizza. It was pretty surreal to see it on the menu." (Although Waller didn't include Hi Neighbor Sam in his doomsday tale, Magnitude did feature another larger-than-life Transcona landmark -- Councillor Russ Wyatt.)

Mr. B's Pizza and Chicken is open five days a week, from Tuesday to Saturday.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 2, 2012 E3