RIP The Only, Hastings Street landmark cafe

Article content

For almost a century The Only was one of the hot spots of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The small “seafood-only” café was where you could find the downtrodden dining beside the well-to-do, chowing down on clam chowder, Alaska cod and salmon fried in the house specialty, lemon butter.

“It was interesting,” said Matt Thodos, whose family owned The Only. “Pretty much everybody that came in there respected the person beside them. We had everybody from Liberace to Pierre Trudeau eat in there.”

The Only not only had great food, it also had one of Vancouver’s great neon signs, a sea horse leaping above whitecapped waves. It was a local landmark, a reminder of the days when Hastings Street was a thriving commercial strip.

But The Only’s fortunes sagged as Hastings declined. It closed in June 2009, amid allegations of drug trafficking by people that had leased the name and location.

This week, demolition crews started to rip it down. B.C. Housing, which owns the site, says “a recent significant structural failure has rendered The Only … unsafe.”

Article content

There is supposed to be an approved plan for a new development when a heritage building is torn down in Vancouver. But the city said it was waived in this case because the city’s chief building official deemed the building “to be a hazard to public safety.”

The building has been empty for a dozen years, which heritage activists call “demolition through neglect.”

“The fact that this building sat empty for so long is crazy,” said civic historian John Atkin. “If you’re going to buy real estate, do something with it. Don’t hang on to it, just because you bought it. It’s very disappointing.”

In 2011, the non-profit Portland Hotel Society announced a plan to resurrect The Only as a “social enterprise,” and bought its building at 20 East Hastings St. But the plan fell apart when Portland’s management was forced to resign by the provincial Liberal government in 2014, and the site was purchased by the province.

Article content

B.C. Housing said it has no immediate plans for the site. But Atkin worries that whatever is eventually built won’t have any retail or restaurant space like The Only.

“The problem will be that the new building, no matter how great the housing is, more than likely will be built with ‘community amenity space’ on the ground floor,” he said. “And as you pile that on a street, you kill the street, because there’s no (commercial) activity on the street.”

The Only building was built circa 1911-12, and originally housed the Don’t Argue, a tobacconists/pool hall operated by pioneer sports magnate Con Jones. The Don’t Argue had one of Vancouver’s all-time great logos, a guy in a bowler hat shoving another guy in the face.

The Don’t Argue’s address was 26 East Hastings, which means it was located upstairs. In recent decades, it was the home of the Logger’s Social Club, a gambling venue.

Article content

The first occupant of 20 East Hastings was a jeweler. The 1917 Henderson’s Greater Vancouver Directory lists the Vancouver Oyster Saloon as the occupant. In 1919 Nick Thodos took over the space, and his family operated it until they leased it out in the late-’80s. Thodos was a Greek immigrant who arrived in Vancouver about 1911 and initially worked as a cook at the English Kitchen restaurant, which was next door at 30 East Hastings. His brother Gus was also in the restaurant business, operating the Golden Gate Café.

Nick Thodos died in 1935 and his sons, Tyke, Leo and Peter, took over The Only. In 1950, Tyke Thodos commissioned the neon sea horse, although he’d never seen one — the design was done by somebody at Neon Products, which is now Pattison Signs.

Article content

The sign is a combination of painted sheet metal and neon tubes. In the daytime, the sea horse is green with blue eyes, ‘Only’ is in white on an amber background and ‘Sea Foods’ is in amber atop blue waves. At night, it’s an orange neon sea horse with red neon eyes, and green neon ‘Only’ and ‘Sea Foods’.

The sign was rebuilt by Pattison Signs when Portland Hotel was going to reopen The Only. It’s now owned by the Thodos family, which has it in storage.

Matt Thodos ran The Only for a brief period after Expo 86, when his uncles retired.

The Only was a classic old-style café, with 17 stools arranged around curved counters and two booths. It had pressed-tin ceilings, an open kitchen where you could watch the cook and was so cramped that they stored the fish on-ice in the front window.

Article content

“The Samis family had a seafood store and every day they would bring all the fresh fish in for us,” he recounts. “Pete Samis. He’d even cut it up and put it in the window. They were good family friends of my father (1940s, ’50s football star Pete Thodos).”

The recipe for the lemon-butter fried fish was simple: “Oil, lemon, butter and oregano.” The idea of using lemon came from their Greek heritage. The Only’s clam chowder was Manhattan-style, which means it was red. The secret was its stock.

“All the fish that we deboned, we would boil the bones and that would be the base of our stock,” he explained. “With that we would add clams and tomato, and all the things that went with it.”

Besides the Thodos family, in its heyday The Only had many longtime employees who became local fixtures. A big fellow named Dick Haase was a cook for decades, and acted as a bouncer when anybody got unruly.

Article content

“He took no crap,” said Matt Thodos. “You had to behave yourself.”

Many comic fans thought Haase was the model for Reid Fleming, the World’s Toughest Milkman, a legendary underground comic by David Boswell. He wasn’t, but Boswell said the resemblance was uncanny.

Thodos also has fond memories of a waitress named Lois.

“She had a memory that was just incredible,” he said. “People hadn’t been in there for five or 10 years and she’d remember them and remember what they liked.”

Maybe the city can put a marker where the restaurant once stood. It wasn’t an architectural masterpiece, but Atkin said, “it certainly embodies a lot of the social history of the neighbourhood.”

It also was the site of a political milestone: the morning after the New Democratic Party won the 1972 provincial election, Premier Dave Barrett and NDP powerhouse Bob Williams went to The Only, because that’s where Barrett’s dad had taken him on special occasions growing up. In one of the booths, they drew up B.C.’s first NDP cabinet.

jmackie@postmedia.com

26 E Hastings – The Only – … by The Vancouver Sun