When I was a little girl, department stores like The Bay were a much bigger part of life than they are now. You could spend several hours in a single store and emerge with everything you wanted and truly needed. They often had two restaurants; a cafeteria coffee shop type and a 'nice' sit down restaurant...the Woodwards at Oakridge in Vancouver had a particularly beautiful modernist dining space that separated the cafeteria and the dining room with a teak room divider. They served the greatest string fries and strawberry tarts.
The Bay on Granville St was another that we went to frequently. We'd line up with trays and patiently wait our turn. I would usually get fish and chips, Mom would get liver and onions, and there would be jello for dessert. Later, in my teens, I'd take myself there and feel all grown up paying for my own meal. It was never the kind of really great food that we had at home, but with enough vinegar and salt on the fries, it was passable fuel. Sometimes I'd take a book with me and read for an hour or two. For all the time that I used to spend in these places, it was almost a surprise last week to run across the cafeteria on the housewares floor of The Bay at Yonge and Bloor. It was prettier than I remembered it being, at least from a distance...more like a furniture display than the cafeteria I remembered. Venturing in, the working portion of the enterprise became more visible, the steam tables, salad bars, sandwich bar and the grill. They still had an all day breakfast, but the mushy peas, liver and onions and whipped powdered mashed potatoes were gone and the menu overall was much more limited than I remembered from the past...fitting considering how few people were there. I ordered sausages and eggs, sunnyside up with brown toast and was told I'd get scrambled. :-) Okay, I'm not a total Princess, it was only $4.99, and I was hungry. The result was neither bad nor good, more predictable than anything...scrambled eggs slightly browned, with no cream added to make the eggs soft, excellent toast that was nicely buttered, crispy 'home fries' in patty form, thicker than those you get at most fast food outlets, with a less greasy taste than one normally gets for such a thing, and sausages that seemed to have been deep fried, crispy as the home fries and slightly chewy. The room was slightly less pretty up close, mainly because of some unattended details, like a few ceiling tiles that had become damaged by a leak in the ceiling at some point and left unrepaired, but otherwise a bright and cheerful room that felt like ladies should be having tea in hats with waitresses in shirtwaist dresses and white aprons, refilling coffee. There was no table service of course, but the ladies that worked there were as friendly as any I'd ever seen and the room was filled with the kind of people who, like me, remembered a day when the department store restaurants were one of the places to go...I was in fact, one of the youngest in the room. While my breakfast wasn't the best, it was still good value for money and I didn't have to eat using plastic 'cutlery' in the food court...and it came with the bonus of a lifetime of memories.
A supertaster with a lifelong passion for food, Gayle's training was at the elbow of her Grandfather and at the Broadcast School of the Galloping Gourmet. She made her first pie at 8 years old and was baking bread solo by 10.
Gayle has written and illustrated a cookbook, Easy Date Oven, that will be published by CanadianFoodies in early 2012.
