By Jason Brown
When a crew of 10 men pulled up to the front door of a Bank Street restaurant recently with orders to collect as much as they could of value, a Centretown institution came to a swift and brutal end.
Imperial Pizza, a greasy spoon that flourished serving pizza and Lebanese fast food for more than 30 years at its 315 Bank St. location, went bankrupt and closed on Feb. 23.
Two days later, the movers arrived and gutted the place.
They took the ovens. They took the tables and chairs. They took the bar. They even took the seats off the permanent stools at the counter.
What they left behind was a dirty shell of the once bustling late-night snack rendez vous.
Hanging in the windows above the shawarma and falafel advertisements were two signs. One said “Open.” The other said “Closed, please come again.” Both were wrong.
Not surprisingly, its phone line has been cut. Imperial Pizza’s owner, George Chaddad, who always had an interesting comment for his customers, has changed his phone number and could not be reached.
“I was over there when the guys from the bank were in there tearing up everything they could get their hands on,” recounted long-time Centretown resident Mike Young. “They just demolished it.”
Young knows the block on Bank Street between Gilmour and MacLaren streets well.
He’s lived and gone to school in the area for his entire 39 years.
“It was a real meeting place for people,” Young said with authority.
“The owner’s mother worked there for the longest time, too. We called her ‘Mama.’ She was everybody’s friend.
“It’s sad to see this sort of thing happen.”
Young said he’s seen a lot of changes to this strip of Bank Street over the years and didn’t hesitate to point out he doesn’t like the condition it’s currently in.
When Young leaves his friends at the Cue and Cushion billiards hall next door and walks to the end of the block, he will pass other empty buildings that still bear the markings of the Wet Lounge, Club 363, Fanny’s strip club, and Hany’s Restaurant. Imperial Pizza has now been added to that list.
“It used to be a really nice street,” Young said. “Then it got bad. Now it’s just decrepit.”
Tom McGowan, who has lived and worked in the area even longer than Young, listened to him speak and nodded his head in approval.
“It was a greasy spoon, but you knew what you were getting,” McGowan said. “I used to go in for a shawarma every now and then. They were good.
“The thing that made him a piss-pot load of money were the pizza slices.”
But things had not been going well for Imperial Pizza in recent years. Federal government downsizing had trimmed the number of customers going to the restaurant and last summer’s closure of Fanny’s, one of Imperial Pizza’s biggest clients, didn’t help things either.
Danny Kenney, an administrator with J.C. Perrier and Associates, was the man put in charge of collecting anything of worth from Imperial Pizza.
He said Imperial Pizza’s owner owes about $100,000 to creditors and that the restuarant was the main source of the debts.
But more lasting than the lost money will be the legacy Chaddad’s personality gave to Imperial Pizza.
“The lamb we serve here in Canada isn’t all lamb, there’s some beef in it because it would taste too strong for Canadians,” Chaddad said with a wide smile to a couple of customers several weeks before his restaurant closed. “Back in Lebanon, where I come from, when we cooked a lamb, the whole town would know because it would stink so much.”