Breakfast at the Hoito: And Other Adventures in the Boreal Heartland

Index

Introduction

FOR THE PAST SEVEN YEARS, northwestern Ontario has been the stimulus and setting for much of my writing, including twenty or more magazine articles. The latter are a testament to what I know and like best about this part of the country: the forests, the lakes, the old mountains, the wildlife, Lake Superior . . . and of course the people, most of whom have, in one way or another, been dreamed and dealt, and sometimes damned, by the landscape they inhabit.

I am happy to include in this collection stories on a variety of individuals and groups, and in particular on the Finns, Italians and local Anishnabe, each of whom I admire for their strength and their enduring cultures.

I am also pleased to include several brief personal pieces, not so much as a record of a specific time or place but of the longer arc of a life.

The stories are arranged not chronologically but in the order that seemed to suit the subjects and flow. All but two of them Breakfast at the Hoito and Thunder Bay: More Personal and Better Imagined — have been published in Canadian magazines.

Because several of the stories were originally written as far back as five years ago, I have attempted to put each into context with a new and separate introduction . . . and thereby feel justified in keeping my introductory introduction to a minimum.

As alway, I wish to thank my wife, Betty, and my children, Matthew, Georgia and Eden for their forebearance and love, and for their tolerance of the writing-caused chaos that so often seems to swallow up our lives. I owe them a lot.

My thanks, too, to my editor Jane Gibson and publisher Barry Penhale at Natural Heritage — for suggesting the book in the first place and for accommodating the unorthodoxies of my work habits. And to Ann Vanderhoof and Ian Darragh, who commissioned and published a number of these stories while they were editors, respectively, of Cottage Life and Canadian Geographic magazines.

Finally, a special thanks to Ann and Nelson King, Alf Petrone, Kal Nikkila, Kathleen McFadden and Pat Forrest, without whose timely and generous support there would be no book.

Breakfast at the Hoito

Like any local hero or old friend, the Hoito restaurant needs no introduction to regional readers and diners. It is one of the most historic restaurants in Canada and, in its characteristic way, one of the best and best-known. I have nothing more to say by way of introduction, either to the place or to the story that follows, than to express a regret that I have not mentioned by name every Hoito employee who was kind enough to chat with me and broaden my experience of the restaurant during two hot days spent in the kitchen last June. My thanks, respect and good wishes to all of them.

HOITO RESTAURANT IN THUNDER BAY—the Hoito as everybody calls it—occupies the basement of the Finn Hall, a commodious old brick pile in the city’s original Finnish quarter on Bay Street. Unlike more recent Finnish buildings, with their sinuous lines and Arctic contours, the hall would seem to have been designed by a dreamy cabal of 19th-century tinker-toy builders. Almost every one of its features—from the porch columns and side-turrets to the central tower with its silvered dunce-cap and Eastern cupola—suggests an afterthought to the H-shaped box at the centre of it all. Aesthetically, the most flattering perspective on the place is from the lookout in Hillcrest Park where, give or take an angle or two, its vast grey roof shows the satisfying dimensions of an elephant’s back.

But nobody is burdened by such thoughts as they descend the stairs into the restaurant, which serves between 500 and 800 meals a day, and can stretch the hungriest customer to the limit with its strenuous Finnish cuisine. The menu is a throwback to the days when immigrant Finnish loggers roamed Bay Street, and the routine breakfast of such men consisted of a bowl of oatmeal porridge, half a dozen pancakes, an equal number of sausages, a plate-sized omelette and a six-inch stack of thickly-buttered rye bread—all washed down with three or four cups of prescription-strength coffee. Dinner was soup, salad, a bowl of mojakka (a beef stew heavy on root vegetables), a pound of roast pork or fillet of lake trout, three or four boiled potatoes, gravy, corn, peas, another six-inch stack of rye bread and half an apple pie. Depending on circumstances and tastes, a Finnish meal might also have included a slice or two of traditional salt fish or suolakala, made from imported salmon or locally caught trout, a slab or two of cardamom-flavoured coffee bread and a bear’s helping of rice pudding or viili, a yogurt-like dish described as clabbered milk on the current Hoito menu and customarily served with homemade strawberry or blueberry sauce. Meals of such exaggerated variety and profusion wouldn’t typically have been available in restaurants of the day, except that, from its beginnings in 1918 until the early 1960s, the Hoito mimicked the bush camps by serving its food on large platters at communal tables—all you could eat for 25 cents during the ’30s, a dollar during the ’60s. The original character of the Hoito was so similar to that of the logging kitchens that, for decades, the restaurant would not hire a cook who did not have bush camp experience.

The Finn Hall and Hoito during the 1950s.

Today, nobody could eat such meals without killing themselves. But the Hoito offers edited versions of them so compelling and reasonably priced that, almost every week-day at noon and supper hour, a line-up of customers is willing to wait up to fifteen minutes for a table in the 110-seat restaurant. By late morning on an average Sunday—brunch day in Thunder Bay—there are a dozen or more customers waiting in the entranceway for seats. As they get them, new people take their places, with the result that the evolving gaggle of pancake-lovers around the door—students, young families, Finnish pensioners—sometimes persists for two hours or more while the kitchen pulses and the cash register clangs. Those who want to avoid line-ups go at (slightly) off hours . . . or go by themselves, knowing that, whatever the time of day, there is invariably an empty stool at the 16-seat counter.

The first meal I ate in Thunder Bay was at the Hoito. I’d flown in from Toronto on a hot day in July, 1991, to begin a two-week teaching stint at the Curtis School of the Arts at Confederation College. The young woman who coordinated the school met me at the airport and, having determined that I hadn’t eaten on my flight, ferried me immediately to this really great Finnish place, where I scarfed up a Sunday special that included cream of chicken soup, Kivela rye bread, coleslaw, peas, a heap of mashed potatoes and a bumper ham steak about as big around as a French beret. For dessert, I had pumpkin pie with whipped cream and as much good coffee as I could drink. Needless to say, I didn’t have a clue about the Hoito’s roots, or its significance in the community, but I was well impressed by its unpretentiousness and by the casual good will obvious among the customers and between the customers and waitresses. The meal, tout complet, cost me $6.50, a value which so inspired me that I showed up the following night for a $7.25 meal of pea soup, pork chops, and lemon pie.

I moved to Thunder Bay with my family in the autumn of that year, and since then have eaten perhaps 300 meals at the Hoito. My daughters, Georgia and Eden, aged 3 and 2, were Hoito veterans long before they took a bite of solid food. Matthew, aged 9, has eaten his weight in Finnish pancakes. I have sent people there, and taken people there, among them every ill-nourished writer who has ever paid a call on me in the city. When Gordie Howe, a friend from my sportswriting days, visited Thunder Bay in 1992, my wife Betty and I, hoping to provide him with a genuine core sample of the city, took him, first, up to Hillcrest Park to see the lake and elevators, then down to Bay Street for breakfast at the Hoito.

Much to its credit, the Hoito is not to everyone’s tastes. Yet it is certainly one of the more distinctive expressions of the fabric of the city and area. It is one of the few such expressions that can be experienced indoors (others I can think of are the Kangas Sauna, the Scandinavian Home, and the Italian and Da Vinci halls). The Hoito’s appeal is so obvious that I have at times speculated on why there aren’t more places like it, and why they never seem to exist in other cities. If a reason can be articulated, it would appear to lie not in desirability but in the simple truth that to everything there is a season, and that the season for starting such places and developing their foundations has passed and is not coming back. A restaurant like the Hoito would have to have been built, as the Hoito was, at a time, and under conditions, and on principles—and, most significantly, amidst people and a culture—that inspired in its founders a genuine concern for the common person. Rare in the past, unheard of today. Good luck to the philanthropic restaurateur in an era when profit rules the market, growth is a mantra, and the world’s most successful diner thrives under the rubric billions and billions served.

But with deep roots in the community and a vaulting head start, the Hoito continues doing more or less what it set out to do when, at the end of World War I, a group of local Finns decided that immigrant Finnish bush workers needed a place in Port Arthur to get a hearty meal at an affordable price. The idea is said to have germinated at Kallio’s bush camp near Nipigon and have travelled to the city, where dozens of prospective customers kicked in a few dollars each. When the pot reached $300, the organizers hired a cook and some waitresses, and the Hoito was born. From the beginning, the place was run on democratic principles—some might say socialistic. Oldtimers report that no one was ever denied a meal for lack of money, and if business was good, prices went down. Even today, Hoito’s owners, the Finnish Building Company, use the restaurant’s proceeds not for private gain but to foster local Finnish culture and education. And the employees, as always, receive decent remuneration for their efforts. Today’s wages range from $8.15 an hour for beginning kitchen helpers to $12-plus for grill cooks.

Much of which was on my mind when, on a day last June, I walked into the office of the manager, Anneli Smith, and asked if I could spend a couple of shifts in the restaurant’s kitchen and recesses, so that I could see exactly how the old institution functioned. My purpose, I explained, was to write about what I saw and heard, and to expose the Hoito if not exactly to the world, at least to a few thousand readers (and to listeners of CBC radio’s Voyage North for whom I did a two-part, half-hour report).

It is a measure of the integrity and self-confidence of the organization that Anneli granted my request without hesitation, suggesting that we go immediately to the kitchen so that she could introduce me to the head cook, Tuula Granholm, as well as to Sirkka Ahola, one of a handful of employees whose responsibilities include opening the place, alone, two or three mornings a week at 4 a.m.

Sirkka and I agree to meet in the parking lot the following day at 3:45 a.m.—an hour, it turns out, at which the sky is showing the faintest wash of gray light, and the blackbirds have just begun to stir in the ash trees behind the restaurant. I arrive chatty with anticipation, but as we round the building onto Bay Street Sirkka turns to me with her finger at her lips, urging me to shush up, and we tiptoe along the sidewalk in a burlesque of the Beagle Boys approaching the vault. It is not until we are almost at the front doors that I understand her concern. There, in the concrete-enclosed garden, just a few feet away, three men lie sleeping in the shadows. Sirkka’s attitude toward them has nothing to do with courtesy—she is afraid to waken them, for fear they might hassle her or attempt to get into the restaurant.

Sirkka Ahola came to Canada from northern Finland in 1969.

She secures the door quickly and proceeds to the kitchen, where, before punching her time card or even removing her jacket, she grinds a pot’s worth of coffee beans, dumps them into a filter, and turns on the coffee maker, so that the day can begin in earnest. Coffee is the Finnish national elixir, and this inaugural pot, made at predawn strength, is the first of 175 (one every four minutes) that the restaurant will brew that day. By mid-morning, the fragrance of the ground beans will be irresistibly hybridized by the smell of fresh strawberry and blueberry sauce bubbling in 5-gallon pots on the nearby stove.

Sirkka emerges from the dressing room and, in apron and hair net, ignites the 20-odd gas jets that heat the ovens and grills along the kitchen’s west wall. She then opens a walk-in refrigerator and, on a trolley, extracts a 20-pound saw-log of beef, two 10-pound pork roasts, 12 pounds of bacon, 200 sausages, 200 eggs, 20 pounds of beef parts for the mojakka, 15 pounds of precut home fries, two 20-pound tubs of peeled onions and carrots, and enough butter for half a dozen heart attacks . . . all of it the merest beginnings of the food that will be cooked and consumed over the next sixteen hours.

With her supplies at hand, she runs a 10-gallon pot of water, heaves it onto the stove, and dumps in the beef for the mojakka. She runs another such pot and sets it to boil for oatmeal porridge. On a back burner, over low heat, she places a 5-gallon pan of dense brown gravy.

Then the beef and pork roasts go in (when they come out, two immense turkeys will take their place). Sirkka stops at a table on which 28 loaves of bread are stacked, withdraws a couple of slices and throws them onto the conveyer belt of the toaster. By the time they reappear, the coffee is ready, and so are we. As we sit at the staff table, she talks wistfully about growing up in northern Finland, near Oulu—of the fabled winters and midnight sun—and of leaving to come to Canada in 1969. She is in her early 60s, and has worked at the Hoito for seventeen years. Two of her daughters have also worked at the restaurant, and her granddaughter, Melanie Bingham, is now a waitress. Sirkka expresses a hope that Melanie’s two-year-old daughter, Sasha—Sirkka’s great-granddaughter—will never hold a job in the famous scullery. I love the place, she says. It’s my second home. But the work is hard—especially in summer, it’s so hot. Sirkka is a disciplined, unassuming woman, with a compact physique and an almost beatific smile and personality. She is as durable as snare wire. As I follow her around, I ask repeatedly if I can help her heft this pot of water, this tub of meat, this box of vegetables—in some cases, 40-pound loads—but she won’t even acknowledge my offers.

At 4:35, she hauls four plastic pails from the refrigerator, each containing two or three gallons of milk, eggs and oil, mixed the previous night for the hundreds of Finnish pancakes that will be served before the grill is turned off at 7:30 this evening. She adds flour to each pail, not by weight or volume but by an educated feel for what the