Say it ain’t so: Joe’s Cafe on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive is closing

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One of the best-known hangouts on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive is closing after nearly half a century of coffee, characters, controversy and the quiet clack of billiard balls.

Joe’s Cafe Bar, known for “the best cappuccino in town” and its signature rainbow sign on the side of the building, will shut its doors forever this fall.

“Hey, everyone. I’m just on here to give you guys an update on the café,” said owner Joe Antunes in a brief social media video. “Unfortunately, we will be shutting down at the end of October this year, 2024. That’s all the news I have. Stay tuned for further updates.”

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Antunes gives no hint in the clip about why the café is closing, and Postmedia News has been unable to reach him.

Joe’s Cafe has been at 1150 Commercial Drive since 1976, under the official name Continental Billiards and Toureiro Cafe. Though a landmark location in Little Italy, Antunes is a former bullfighter from Portugal who took over the spot with his brother Tony and has run it ever since.

B.C. singer-songwriter Wyckham Porteous was a frequent visitor back in the day, and even wrote a song about the place. “We all get together, at the worn-out café / Treat us all like family / So we come back every day / Talk about our politics / Talk about where we’ve been / Talk about our recipes / Talk about our sins,” Porteous sang in Blind Love.

Speaking of sins, Antunes’s café was the target of protests by lesbian activists in 1990 after the owner took offence over two women kissing at a table — a politically incorrect sin in the eyes of The Drive’s big, boisterous lesbian community of the day, which had long seen Joe’s as a safe space.

After Antunes asked them to stop, in what he said was an attempt to keep the place family friendly, he was hit with weeks of raucous protests and lost a big chunk of his serving staff and eclectic clientele.

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A quasi-boycott by the gay community lingered for years afterward, but the café carried on largely unchanged into the new millennium, continuing to serve espressos, pastries and sandwiches amid a few pool and foosball tables and a lot of chatter.

The protests clashed with Joe’s reputation as a gathering place for anyone and everyone.

But Antunes is, as Porteous noted, “a macho guy from Portugal,” and the café might be the only place in the left-leaning neighbourhood that features a bull’s head and a portrait of fascist Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar — who died in 1970 — on its walls.

Porteous said the anything goes vibe at Joe’s was the whole point, serving “like a living room” where everyone could feel comfortable.

“It always had an alliance of people,” he told The Vancouver Sun after the 1990 protests. “It had that old European, Little Italy feel. It attracted the young students from university, the left wing. It was a neighbourhood bar in a European way.”

Decades after Joe’s Cafe Bar survived that controversy, it seems the sun is about to set on its scruffy charm, and The Drive will lose one more of its 20th-century cornerstones.

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With files from The Vancouver Sun archives

jruttle@postmedia.com

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