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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Wagon Wheel diner serves last club sandwich today
Diners get a taste of the Wagon Wheel Thursday. (PHOTOS BY RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS) Photo Store
Fran Gomez arrives at 6 a.m. to get the turkeys roasting.
Customers Arlene Van Ruiten (left) and Thea Firth share memories about the Hargrave Street eatery, which closes today.
Fans of Winnipeg's most famous club sandwich will be forced to quit cold turkey following today's closure of the Wagon Wheel Lunch, the venerated diner that served as a living bridge to downtown's pedestrian-friendly, small-business past.
The 61-year-old Hargrave Street cubbyhole -- one of Western Canada's last remaining authentic diners -- will experience one final, frenetic lunch rush after proprietor Fran Gomez fires up her gas stove for the final time this morning.
"My lighter is dying, together with the restaurant," she quipped Thursday morning at 6:15 a.m. as she fiddled with the stove. She then placed three Hutterite turkeys -- "These are the best, meaty turkeys" -- inside the oven, where they would roast all morning and eventually feed a lunch crowd that has lined up along Hargrave Street over the past two weeks.
The Wagon Wheel is not closing due to lack of business, as anyone who's tried and failed to grab a booth or stool at the lunch counter even before the closure was announced can attest.
The construction of 311 Portage at Centrepoint, a $75-million hotel, office, residential and parkade complex, requires the demolition of the four-storey Norlyn Building, home to the Wagon Wheel since 1951.
Gomez, who assumed management of the restaurant following the death of longtime owner Louis Mathez in 2010, has no plans to reopen in a new location. For starters, the profit margins on making roast-turkey sandwiches, chicken noodle soup and banana cream pies from scratch are thin enough for a diner located in a narrow corner of an older building.
The economics would not work in a more modern space. Nor would it make esthetic sense to move the Wagon Wheel's low-slung lunch counter, vinyl orange banquettes and replica wooden wagon wheels -- all nearly unchanged relics from the 1950s -- into a strip mall or office building.
"It would be nice to see it in a new place, but would it be the same?" asked Damon Mitchell, a 10-year regular who lined up outside the diner Thursday.
Inside, 41-year Wagon Wheel customer Thea Firth said she will no longer have much of a reason to visit downtown after today. The former Norlyn Building office worker fondly recalls the days when almost every downtown business was like the Wagon Wheel -- small, independent and owner-operated -- and all the streets and storefronts bustled with pedestrian activity.
"This place is comfortable. It's clean. It's extremely reasonable and you can get one heck of a meal," said Firth. "I don't know where else I'm going to find food like this."
Hundreds of other Winnipeggers apparently feel the same way. Over the past two weeks, souvenir-seeking Wagon Wheel regulars have stolen the diner's orange plastic menus and have showered Gomez with gifts that range from flowers to booze money.
"There was this one old customer. Big fellow. He was crying," Gomez recalled. "He said, 'When this is over, drink a bottle of wine.' I'm not much of a wine drinker, but I'll try it."
On the diner's penultimate day, the clientele ranged from young businessmen in suits to older women with change purses to 20-somethings in T-shirts.
The broad nature of the diner's customer base is a testament to the appeal of what's become a rare restaurant commodity: comfort food that's made from scratch.
Mathez started at the Wagon Wheel in 1958 and manned the turkey oven until he died. Gomez, who fled El Salvador during that country's civil war in the 1980s, started working in the diner as a waitress in 1984 and took over the restaurant following a short period when the space went dark.
She will close the doors for a final time today at 6 p.m. She's not certain what she will do on Monday morning, when she no longer has to get up at dawn to put the turkeys in the oven.
"Maybe I'll still be glad to not be here, because it hasn't really hit me," she said.
"I haven't had time to think about it."
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 13, 2012 B1
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