No, I am not eulogizing the Midtown. Not yet anyway. Heck, I just ate supper at the Midtown tonight with a buddy from my old university days. It has changed a bit, though - they now have chicken wings!
I am talking about the bastion of real beer on the East Coast of Canada, Ginger's Tavern, home of the Granite Brewery.
I could go on and on about the place, starting from 1983 when I used to go there and play pool with longshoremen waiting for a call from the Union Hall down the street to go load stuff. Back then Kenny, Dan and a couple other characters poured pints of the only real beer in Eastern Canada. When Kevin Keefe was a firey angry Irish brewer who nearly had to burn down government buildings to get a license to make beer.
And the music they had there back then, in the mid to late 80's. Bands from Preston and Musquodobit jamming together on stage, everyone groovin' to the music. The only place I knew in Halifax where the local black community was truly welcome. Kevin didn't care - long as you paid your bill and didn't give the musicians too hard a time.
The the sad move from the old place to the Henry House - a fine dining type place that we all feared would cover the edges of Gingers with too much polish, making the beer thing trendy and suave. But the place survived, in the downstairs part anyway. It became more family, more upscale, and the food showed the rest of town what pub food could be.
And always, there was the Best Bitter. My pint, a beer that when fresh, a beer I could not have just one of. And that was the thing - the beer was real. It was real ale, brewed like Kevin learned to make it in England. Made with British equipment. It tasted like the beer we all had on our "find yourself" jaunts to Europe, when we wandered into a country pub in the South of England and asked for a beer.
Then there was the next move, up to a building Kevin owned on Barrington, where he could have the brewpub become a brewery, and keg the beer in casks for sale back to the new owners of the Henry House, and the Lions Head and the Spitfire Arms...
The new place on Barrington took so long to open. When it did I suggested to Kevin that he should change the name to "The Opening Soon" as that sign had stood for over a year in the window. But the Best Bitter was there, and therefore so was I.
The new smoking rules came in, and Kevin spent a lot of money re-workiing the space to meet the percentage area for a smoking bar downstairs and the non-smoking upstairs. He was told he had three years to operate that way.
The music venue upstairs was great, with wonderful acoustics when it was full. I saw a lot of good stuff there. The best was Tom Russell and Andrew Hardin, playing to a packed house, and drinking too much while trying to pick up the girls in "The Johnson Sisters".
Then the smoking ban came, two years early, brought in by liars and thieves. All the work on air handling, renovations and fit up to meet the former rules, work that was amortized over the promised three years was lost. Instead of allowing people a place to smoke in peace, we drove them out on the street, and out of the clubs where they provided the major part of the income. Gingers' downstairs was the best smoking bar in town, next to Tom's. (I don't smoke) Then it was all gone. And unlike Tom's, it never recovered that business.
Joe the bartender ruled the place, and it became a St. John's pub when he was on duty. A boozer, a place to sit at the bar and shoot the breeze. And drink Best Bitter, and, for some, Peculiar. A new crowd of young people found it, and made it their own.
Now the bar is closed. The music silent, and the brewery moving to an industrial site on the north end.
Maybe Mill Island, Kevin's planned brewery, hotel, retail, and condo development in Windsor will happen, eventually. It is the current version of the "opening soon", now, I guess.
Until then, all I can hope is that the Henry House learns to clean their lines. Real beer needs care, and they don't make it there.
There were several days when I had lunch at the Granite in Toronto and made it back to Halifax in time to compare the Best Bitter and Dry Hop at both places within hours. And the time I happened upon a Keefe family reunion in the Toronto Granite, and was invited in to sit down and drink with the brothers. And the time my little niece, coached carefully by the "Mel-star" took a wild throw at her first ever dartboard, and hit the red bulls-eye from 10 feet. And the time... Well, like I said, I could go on for a while.
I have had 25 years worth of dropping in for a pint of Best. I sure hope I can do that for another 25.
Bottoms up!
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