W. Broadway & Granville, Vancouver, 1983

For years, since I began to bring my Eighties Vancouver work into the light of day, I have lamented that, among many missed opportunities, I never photographed the landmark Aristocratic Diner, located on the southwest corner of W. Broadway and Granville. It was demolished in 1997.

That was the last location of a once prosperous chain of Vancouver restaurants, founded by baker Frank Hunter in the late 1920s.  The Aristocratic restaurants represent another irreplaceable Vancouver tradition that, to my mind, have no peer today. Nonetheless, I have great concern for independent restauranteurs struggling to survive in the face of Covid-19.

I often sat at one of the Aristocratic’s humble tables, on days rainy or sunny, watching the world go by as I sipped coffee and ate one of the affordable burgers that Hunter set out to provide at his first location, a drive-in at Kingsway and Fraser.

There are some wonderful examples of photographs that document the Broadway and Granville location. The photo above, not one of those, nonetheless includes the once-familiar neon sign.  That remnant, with “Risty” the top-hatted aristocrat promising “Courteous service … Quality food,” ended up in the Vancouver Museum.

Shot almost randomly as I drove towards the intersection in heavy rain, my photo* catches the Aristocratic almost by accident. My one-handed driving, happily, did not lead to the vehicular equivalent. The negative, last on a roll**, turned up hidden under another strip of film in a polyethylene conservation page. This is its world debut.

*The elevated perspective comes via the Chevy 20 van I owned at the time. It provided transportation to many climbing and skiing trips, carrying artist’s works to galleries, and models and crew to location shoots.
**Often, you’d get more that the advertised number of exposures on a roll of film — say, 38 rather than 36. If there was a “keeper” on the final frames, I’d slide those under the last strip into the 3-ring negative page.