Aged to perfection Timeless design, harmony of contrasts keep Rae & Jerry’s relevant, revered Landmarks
By: Alison Gillmor Posted: 5:20 PM CDT Monday, Mar. 11, 2024

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/03/2024 (573 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When new owners took over Rae & Jerry’s in January, Winnipeggers needed reassurance. They wanted to know our city’s iconic steakhouse would remain (mostly) unchanged. And it wasn’t just about the menu. It was also about the resto’s signature design.

Architect Herb Enns understands. In the book Winnipeg Modern, Enns wrote the chapter on “Living Modernism,” which highlights Rae & Jerry’s as a model of mid-century design that remains functional and beautiful decades later.

According to Enns, “The imaginative ambitions of the schema have remained viable and alive. It hasn’t aged. It’s steadfast.

“If you had fun and enjoyed an evening there four years ago, you can come back, and it will be there for you. You can find the same chair,” he suggests. “Nothing changes.”

While there have been some tweaks to the restaurant over the years, the initial vision for the building, by Winnipeg architecture firm Smith Carter Katelnikoff, with interior design by Leslie Girling, has remained remarkably consistent.

When original owners John Rae and Jerry Hemsworth opened this iteration of their steakhouse in 1957 — two previous restaurants had been located closer to the downtown centre — Rae & Jerry’s must have seemed like the absolute last word in suburban supper-club sophistication and style.

In the years following, that cool atmosphere — from the ring-a-ding red-and-white sign beckoning drivers from Portage Avenue to the red leatherette quilting on the bar to the jaunty typeface on the cocktail napkins — has kept its cachet.

While other restaurant design trends come and go, Rae & Jerry’s just keeps doing its thing.

In this simple one-storey modernist structure, the straightforward painted brick exterior, light and white, makes a nice contrast with the enveloping, inviting interior, with its warm, dark colours and relatively low ceilings. (Full disclosure: My father, architect R.D. Gillmor, worked on the ceiling system. Its multi-planed pattern was partly for esthetic effect and partly to disguise the ductwork.)

“The ribbed wall panels are black, but there’s so much red coming off the carpets and upholstery, there’s a slight brown tinge to them,” Enns relates. “I’ve always thought, for years and years, that it’s like sitting down inside a rare grilled steak.

“It’s a curious place,” he goes on, mentioning the “totally inventive” leather woven ceiling at the bar, the metal-panelled fireplace with a grid of divots and the mirrored surfaces.

“Each of those things is pleasurable to look at, but how do they come together? Somehow it all works … It’s like someone who has an eccentric outfit that’s completely together.”

There is a time-capsule vibe to some of Rae & Jerry’s elements. You can still see the two alcoves that would have once held telephones, with shelves underneath for phonebooks. But it’s not just that super-cool retro Mad Men look that keeps people coming back. It’s good design that works now, thanks to Smith Carter Katelnikoff’s timeless structure and Girling’s thoughtful eye for scale and detail.

Enns picks up on some of those choices. “The tables in the dining room offer what I call real estate,” he explains. “There’s often a few things going on — tomato juice, bread, water glasses, wine — but there’s enough room that space is not contested.”

And he especially loves the lounge chairs: “I like how they pivot and rotate, and the arm rests are exactly where they need to be.”

Even the smallest, plainest details matter, according to Enns: “I often go on a detour and just look at the coat hooks. They’re one of my favourite things. They’re offset, one row and then another row below, so you can get more coats in.”

For the same reason he seeks out those original coat hooks, Enns tries to avoid the redesigned, renovated bathrooms, which have “kind of an ’80s hotel feel.” (Some people actually shun them because they break the period spell.)

Rae & Jerry’s is also a clear example of the ways design can generate emotional connections. Sure, there are times when you’re curious to see the next big thing in restaurant decor, but there’s a lot to be said — especially for notoriously sentimental Winnipeggers — for the power of familiarity and reliability.

At Rae & Jerry’s, those longstanding design features can be a visual cue for memories — of family celebrations, school reunions, weekly lunch gatherings. That unchanging quality, which encourages emotional associations, might be why former Winnipeggers will head to Rae & Jerry’s when they’re in town for a visit.

While the restaurant itself may have changed very little, what’s around it has shifted over the decades. According to Christian Cassidy, a local historian and Free Press contributor who blogs on buildings and their stories at West End Dumplings, when the steakhouse opened, the site was relatively remote and surrounded on one side by bush.

“Rae and Hemsworth had opened a first steakhouse, which was their second restaurant, at Portage and Langside in 1951. It proved very successful, and they wanted bigger premises and especially onsite parking,” Cassidy says.

They needed room, as he points out, and “at that time, in the postwar development period, they had to go the edge of the city to find a place. The lot was at the border between the city of Winnipeg and the city of St. James.”

To get space for the restaurant as well as parking for 200 cars, Cassidy continues, “they were lucky enough to find what had been a commercial fuel lot. It was an original river lot given to John Omand, of Omand’s Creek fame. The Swail family purchased the former Omand homestead, and that’s where Swail moved his fuel yard.”

With this new venue, Rae and Hemsworth were prescient about the shift toward car culture, a postwar trend that would be reinforced by the construction, in 1959, of nearby Polo Park, a suburban shopping centre that opened with an optimistic modern mood and another big parking lot.

“Rae & Jerry’s caught that wave of people who wanted to drive right up to the restaurant,” Cassidy suggests. “They nestled the restaurant at the back of the lot, so you weren’t watching traffic go by. At the time it would have been a little bit of paradise on the edge of the city, like a supper club with a long driveway up to the canopy at the restaurant door.”

Cassidy credits the steakhouse’s longevity to “consistency and nostalgia” and its good-looking period feel. “You can kind of see Jim Rockford or Columbo at a steakhouse like this,” he jokes.

But he also cites a specifically Winnipeg phenomenon: “You could be sitting there with anyone. The mayor could be at the next table or a guy in a polo shirt and chinos,” Cassidy says.

“They’ve somehow managed to capture ‘the next generation’ for a couple of generations now.”–Christian Cassidy

There’s also the mix of old-timers and young hipsters. “They’ve somehow managed to capture ‘the next generation’ for a couple of generations now.”

As someone who documents the city’s history, Cassidy is very happy to see new owners prepared to take on R&J’s legacy.

“It’s easy to lose places like this. I often document buildings before they go,” Cassidy explains; he’s relieved that he probably won’t have to do that for Rae & Jerry’s any time soon.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca