Diamond anniversary ribs: Silver Heights Restaurant marking 60 years as a Winnipeg hot spot

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/02/2017 (3182 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If the owners of the venerable Silver Heights Restaurant, which turns the big six-o later this year, ever wondered if their relationship with their clientele extended beyond baby-back ribs and flame-broiled steaks, they received their answer Sept. 4, 2015.

At approximately 2 p.m. that afternoon, Winnipeg was struck by a violent thunderstorm that overwhelmed parts of the city’s sewer system, including a section that services “the Heights,” at 2169 Portage Ave. Tony Siwicki, who runs the place with his wife, Sue, father, Jim and brother, J.C. was pulling the afternoon shift at the time. He high-tailed it into the men’s washroom, after one of his servers bellowed, “Uh, Tony, you might want to take a look at this.”

“There was a tower of water shooting out one of the toilets, about 10 feet into the air,” Siwicki recalls, seated inside his family’s 2,200-square-foot locale, which has quadrupled in size since May 1957, the month his grandfather Anthony and three of his taxi-driving buddies sold their cabs to put a down payment on an existing coffee shop.

“We grabbed a bunch of five-gallon pails to scoop (the water) up, and were filling one (pail) every few seconds. So you can do the math as to how much water went through this place, before we finally got it stopped around 6 (p.m.)”

Close to a dozen customers were in the dining room when the deluge hit. Siwicki apologized for the disruption and informed everybody they’d have to leave, which they did — only to return 20 minutes later armed with towels, sheets and blankets… anything they could find, pretty much, to help soak up the mess.

“It was something else,” says the married father of two, who started as a maître d’ for his grandfather at age 12. “Apparently they’d gone down the neighbouring streets, knocking on doors, asking homeowners if they had shop vacs or anything else they could borrow. A bunch even came back the next day to help us clean the carpets.”

(When Siwicki is asked if he fed his Good Samaritans in return for their efforts, he smiles and says, “Yeah, and then some.”)

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“Best ribs in town” has been the Silver Heights’ unofficial motto for decades, but Jim Siwicki, 67, has been around long enough to remember when that boast wasn’t necessarily the case.

In 1964, Jim’s father got into a heated spat with his chef — a row that concluded with the cook telling the elder Siwicki, who, by then, was the premises’ sole owner, to take his job and, well, you know.

“My dad was in a bit of jam, because I was the only other cook he had and I was only 15 at the time,” says Jim, noting people still ask about his father, who showed up for work regularly right up until the day he died in 1997, at age 79. “I remember him calling up this lady named May Pearson, who cooked for him and his partners when they first opened, and begging her to come back to help out. He told her, ‘Jimmy’s here, but he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing.’”

Pearson reported for work the next day, as requested. She was horrified, however, when she spotted her teenage counterpart preparing ribs, which had been added to the menu a year or two earlier.

“I was about to drop the ribs into this big pot of boiling water when she started screaming and hollering, asking me what the hell I was doing,” Jim says, remarking to Tony, “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this story.”

“I explained to her I was only doing what I’d been shown, but she told me in no uncertain terms that nobody would be boiling ribs in her kitchen. She fetched out these big, black roasting pans, put the ribs in those with a dash of seasoning salt and threw everything into the oven. We’ve been preparing ribs the same way, ever since.”

Oh, about that “world’s best” claim; a few years ago Tony was headed to the Dominican Republic for a January holiday, when an airport agent asked him what was in his carry-on luggage. Tony informed the worker that, besides a few personal items, he was also transporting 10 fully-cooked racks of ribs, which he’d swathed in foil paper and stored in a leak-proof container.

“You’re taking barbecue ribs with you on a trip to the Caribbean?” the worker wondered aloud.

“Got to,” Tony explained. “A guy I know runs a bar down there, and he told me not to bother showing up, unless I brought some with me.”

It’s a few minutes before noon in the Silver Heights lounge, a space Tony’s grandfather once dubbed the Flight Deck, owing to its popularity with parched pilots who used to touch down at nearby Stevenson Field in the late 1950s and early ‘60s.

A VLT repairman is seated at one end of the long, oak bar, where he is leafing through a stack of invoices. Tony informs the chap he has about five minutes, before he’s going to have to switch seats.

When the fellow responds, “But there’s nobody in the joint,” Tony glances to his left and whispers, “Oops, too late.”

Know how a particular bar on television — that one where everybody knows your name — has its familiar set of regulars? Well, that’s often the case at the Silver Heights, too.

“This is home to a lot of people and by that, I don’t mean it’s just their watering hole. It’s where they come to get away, to feel comfortable and to catch up with their friends,” Tony says, nodding at Norm — yes, that’s his real name, just like the character George Wendt played in Cheers — as the retired octogenarian settles into his preferred perch, stating, “I’ll have the usual.”

“Take Norm, for example, and his buddy, Mo,” Tony continues, as he tops up Norm`s mug. “They’ve been coming here so long, and have been sitting in the same places for so long, that a few years ago, we engraved their names on a set of plaques, which we glued onto the bar top, to let everybody else know these are their seats.”

Tony mutters “Where do I start?” when he is asked about famous faces who have passed through his doors, in the last 60 years.

“All the old Jets used to come in. Ab McDonald was just here the other day, as a matter of fact, and (former National Hockey League referee) Andy Van Hellemond signed his first NHL contract right there,” he says, pointing to a table parked underneath a framed Teemu Selanne jersey. “And Burton Cummings… he used to pop by a bit, till the night some jerk started singing Guess Who songs in his ear.”

The owners of the Silver Heights Restaurant intend to toast their 60th anniversary the same way they celebrated their 50th year in business — with an all-you-can-eat ribs challenge, slated for the first week of June.

“We’ll do it outside on the patio, and we’ve already applied to the city, asking if we can close off a lane of traffic on Portage (Avenue), to accommodate all the people who are going to want to watch,” Tony says, noting the winner of the inaugural contest in 2007 managed to toss back 14 full racks of ribs in the allotted, 10-minute period. (“They made me enter, too,” Jim points out, “but after half a slab I said, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’”)

When questioned about his restaurant’s future – more specifically, is there a fourth-generation Siwicki somewhere down the pike who will eventually take over – Tony smiles, then recounts an exchange that occurred between him and his 10-year-old daughter Mikenna, a few years ago.

“My son, Declan, is hockey, hockey, hockey, but Mikenna is more like her dad, I’m afraid. When she was five, we were in here having lunch when she stopped eating her bowl of soup to ask me a question. She wanted to know what our server’s job was, exactly. She said, ‘She’s walked past us five times without asking if we’re OK, or if we needed anything.’

“I was like, ‘You’re absolutely right,’ and thought later, wow, this place is in her DNA.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca