People’s Diner on Dupont in Toronto

On Sunday Rachelle and I wandered up to Dupont Street with the aim of going to People’s Diner for brunch. However, before we did this we stopped into Ezra’s Pound to pick-up a coffee. The literary pretentions of the name give you a pretty fair indication of what to expect. You know, it’s the sort of place where somebody has spent a fair amount of money to make it look like they spent very little. Impeccably art designed, but intending to suggest a casual, almost accidental arrangement of lost and found beauty, a distant, uncompromising hipster ethos presides. The whole operation groans just a bit beneath the weight of its holier than thou aesthetic.

Coffee pedants with laptops sit at the cramped tables and servers who pretend to be more interested in maintaining the integrity of their craft than in customer service, work the bar. As Rachelle and I passed through I noticed a table inhabited by a university-aged couple. Serious and hunched over in distant concentration, they both read thin and difficult paperback books in defiance of the populist culture they so clearly abhorred.

“Those things, those things you’re holding in your hands,” I said, as if astonished, “what are they?”

What I’d hoped might result in some whimsical banter instead produced a short, somewhat prickly conversation about the integrity of books, and as Rachelle and I left with our high-end coffees, I was happy to be heading to People’s, an old school diner that served slutty, speedy breakfasts to people with hangovers.

People’s, an iconic Toronto institution, has been around for 50 years and is run by a candid Greek family. They don’t look like the sorts who are transitioning through the service industry into something else. No, they come in all shapes, sizes and ages, and the women who work the floor are good at their jobs, have large arms that will never see a Spin class and seem generally concerned, even offended, if you don’t finish all your eggs. At each booth there’s a barely functioning little jukebox and a huge laminated menu with all the things you expect, in fact need, to find at a diner. It’s a gem, and Rachelle and I have been going there for as long as we’ve known one another.

Well, on Sunday we found out that it had closed.

And there you go.

The world just went and changed on us.

It’s a melancholy thing, this, and as we stood there in front of the place considering all the other inferior options around us, a small group of like-minded people were making the same discovery and going through the same process. One of these people was a solitary, elderly man with vivid bruises on his arms, an expensive watch and a food-catching mustache.  He seemed a little bit lonely, even lost in the face of this news, and so we ended up going out for brunch with him at another local place.

He had a very gentle, slightly effeminate manner and he graciously answered all the questions that we asked, telling us that his journey started in Nebraska before winding it’s way over the course of 80+ years through Little Rock, Grand Rapids and Pittsburgh, amongst others, before finding himself in Toronto and sitting across from us on a Sunday afternoon. He told us that he’d found a kind of peace in Toronto, and as he said that there was some  sadness in his eyes.

We all tried to order the same things that we would have had at People’s, but it just wasn’t the same, and as we shook hands and promised to see one another again after the meal, we knew that we wouldn’t, that our time, too, had passed.