There was a period of time in my youth when I was crazy about sports cards. I’d take my collection out to the front lawn on summer afternoons to see what I could sell. Super Nintendo games weren’t cheap, and I really wanted Street Fighter II – like, really wanted it. On one particular Saturday afternoon, I was visited by a young guy, early twenties, who had pulled over to see what I was selling. He introduced himself as Chris and explained that he was opening a sports bar in town and wanted some memorabilia to hang on the walls.
He took a hard look at my Steve Yzerman rookie card and my Gretzky second-year in semi-mint condition, but ultimately passed. His visit made an impression on me, though, because I thought owning a sports bar would be a pretty cool job, one that I might do if my hockey career didn’t pan out (it didn’t).
Fast forward to the fall of 1993, and I’m a young know-it-all punk who’s just entered high school, thinks Beastie’s Boys Check Your Head is the best album of all time, and is still on a high from seeing the Blue Jays win another World Series. I’m not collecting sports cards anymore, but still love watching a game or two. There’s buzz around town about a new spot called The Original Evies Sports Café that’s recently opened across from Heritage Place (aka the new mall). And get this: it’s got a big screen TV and amphitheatre seating!
As it turns out the owner is the same Chris who stopped by my yard looking for sports memorabilia a few years back. He wasn’t lying about opening a sports bar, one that would soon become the preferred hangout for anyone who considered themselves young in Owen Sound (think the Emporium pool hall in Dazed and Confused).
This included my high school friends and I, who had just started a charity organization (and I use the term ‘organization’ very loosely here) called The Goodfellaz, with meeting places consisting of empty high school classrooms and Evie’s, where we would plan out charity events like the three-on-three basketball tourney for the Canadian Paraplegic Foundation. Come to think of it, that was the only event we ever put on. Even though the club didn’t survive, our visits to Evie’s continued until eventually we were old enough to enjoy the odd brewskie, and then you’d find us there, along with hundreds of others, for $2 Crystals on Toonie Tuesdays and cheap pitchers on Thirsty Thursdays. The lineup outside formed at 7pm and didn’t stop until max capacity.
Yes, Chris Evans opened up an iconic spot when he conceived of The Original Evie’s Sports Café, and while he didn’t use any of my hockey memorabilia for his walls, he did provide a backdrop for my formative years in Owen Sound, along with hundreds of others.
What now exists a pet store across from the Heritage Place Mall was once Evie’s Sports Café and is spoken about with reverence among a demographic of people in Grey County who spent just as much time there as they did at the mall.
I caught up with Chris Evans recently to relive the days when he ran the hippest, likely busiest, spot in town. We met up at Owen Sound’s current iteration of a sports cafe, Papi’s Eatery and Lounge, and as it turns out, the Papi’s building was actually one of the spots that Chris originally looked at to open his restaurant.
First off, I tell him about the impetus for this article. I was rummaging through some old photographs after a high school friend passed and came across one of us sitting at the back round-booth where we spent many a weekend catching up and goofing around. It brought a flood of memories, but most importantly, it reminded me of how carefree a time it was then. Our only worry was where to go after Toonie Tuesday ended (Hint: it was usually Brothers The Bar, sadly since torn down). I’ve recently realized that most places from my upbringing no longer exist – the schools I went to, the places I hung out at, and even the gas bar I worked at has removed the pumps.
But that’s what makes hanging out with old friends so much fun. Lost places force us to rely on memories, and it’s these shared memories that prop up great conversations. Just as Evie’s provided a place for my friends and I to hang out back in the day, it now provides the content for nostalgia when we get together.
And when we look back, we may not remember the exact day that Evie’s opened (December 28, 1993) but we remember the amphitheatre seating and the faux locker room shower by the pay phone (where anyone cool enough to have a pager could answer their pages).
“Going in, I know I wanted an amphitheatre,” says Evie. “I went all around Toronto to see what was going on [with sports cafes]. I really wanted to have some tiered seating…nobody else had that…it was sick.” And if you looked up, you saw a football field painted on the ceiling above the bleachers, just one of the little details that made Evie’s such a unique spot for this area.
“I wanted to have an indoor rink, so that was the tile. I wanted to have a pool table with real hockey boards around it. We got those down in Toronto. We wanted to have a really long bar and big bulkhead; bar side and dining room side; skate blades on the doors for handles.”
He had 17 TVs at one point – and a 55” big screen, where we watched all the big games, none bigger than the Super Bowl when DJ Keith Peer ran the show and gave away all sorts of prizes.
But Evans didn’t create Evie’s on his own. He called on some friends to help him with the $270,000 in renovations. “I had a lot of friends – Rick Corbett, Scott Frook, Dev Underwood, Travis Lowe… I just contracted them and that’s who helped me build it. Rick Corbett was the main contractor,” he says, pauses and laughs. “It was expensive.”
It might have been less expensive to frame in an internet café, something he toyed with in the early stages, but that idea never lasted. “It had to be sports related,” he says. “That’s just my make-up.”
Evie’s love for sports inevitably led to a partnership with the Owen Sound Plater’s (former Attack) right away. “I was their main guy for many years and fed the team. We did a contra deal. I got my name on the boards,” he says. “That’s how I met Wayne Primeau, Jamie Storr, and Kevin Weekes. Weekes-y and I are still friends to this day. He was drafted in my restaurant over three meetings with Billy Smith. And he remembers that…we go back and forth all the time.”
He also tells me a story about Jamie Storr showing him his new sports car in the parking lot with California plates after he got signed to the LA Kings. My memory of a car in the parking lot was plastering our friend’s Jeep with newspaper one evening, just one of the many pranks we pulled on our friends there.
Sure, his name was on the sign, but Evans didn’t run Evie’s on his own either. He had a big staff who all made his place the happenin’ spot that it was. He started out with 47 employees and at one point was up to a whopping 70 staff members.
Managing a staff that size is a big undertaking and Evans drew on his eight years experience in the restaurant industry to lead his new management team through training and opening. Prior to opening Evie’s, he had worked at Mother’s Pizza (back when servers made $3.75/hour), before moving onto East Side Mario’s where he became manager. It was at this time that Evans also completed a three-year business marketing diploma at Georgian College in Owen Sound.
Running a business was certainly in Evie’s blood. His roots run deep in the Owen Sound commercial sector, stretching back to the Hyndman-Adams shipping company his grandparents ran. “I really felt my grandpa was living his life through me again,” he says. “I gave him that rebirth.”
Every entrepreneur knows that location is key, and Evie took his time finding the right spot. He passed on a few locales, including the space we’re currently chatting in – Papi’s Eatery and Lounge back when it was Nathaniels. He also scoped out the space where Little Caesar’s Pizza is, but ultimately settled on the spacious real estate across from the Heritage Place. The process took four months, but in the end, he had a location, a name, loads of experience, and a lot of friends who would come to support him. And a young population looking for a hangout.
“Right out of the get-go, it was just crazy” he says. “There was no debit, only cash.”
The money was flowing in, but remember that sizable debt he incurred at the get-go? Yeah, the first year of any restaurant is just grinding it out and just trying to break even. He often found himself jumping on the line in the kitchen, washing dishes, and slinging drinks. “There were a lot of long hours,” he says. “I had to be there.”
If you spent time at Evie’s, you might remember the 10 cent wings, but Chris reminds me of the other popular items on the menu: onion chips, home-made mushroom caps, perogies, and burgers. He went through six menus in his ten years, all of which he designed himself.
“My favourite was On Deck Nachos,” he says and immediately rhymes off its tagline: “this healthy portion can’t wait to come to the plate.” It’s clear how much of an impact the restaurant had on Chris – he still remembers every tagline, every detail, every employee, and even every jingle.
“Traditional Evie’s Sports Café. Get it good. See you at Evies,” he sings and laughs at how much that jingle cost him. He tells me there aren’t many days that go by when he doesn’t think of the business he ran. It must feel pretty good to have provided a spot that so many people loved; he often gets stopped around town from loyal patrons to relive their memories.
I don’t remember as much as Chris does, nor should I – It was his life for ten years, while it was just my hangout. I’m sure the whole menu was good. I guess I was too busy ordering $7 pitchers to explore my culinary palette much. Hell, I was still eating Kraft Dinner two nights a week, so mushroom caps weren’t high on my list.
Although I did delight my taste buds with exotic concoctions like Cement Mixers and Prairie Fires. Lord, why did we torture ourselves like that? Why did we ask for the nastiest combos we could think of? Right-of-passage I guess. It certainly was tradition to spend your nineteenth birthday at Evie’s celebrating with friends (mine wasn’t exactly my finest hour).
And it served as the reunion spot when everyone came back home for the holidays. One group of friends made it a point to reunite on Thanksgiving each year (see feature photo).
“But the flood was followed by another catastrophe, this one came in a suit and tie: his insurance broker informed him that his insurance was going up”
As Evie and I swap stories from that time, we have to lament that a place like Evie’s may never exist again. It was the place we all met to catch up and find out what was happening in each other’s lives. There were no apps for that back then. It was the original FOMO. If you didn’t go to Evie’s, you didn’t get the low-down from everyone. Chris knows exactly what I mean. “You’ll never have that social interaction ever again. You’re pumped all day to see your friends. If you’re talking to your buddies all week and looking at their social media feeds at all the stuff they’re doing, it’s not as fun to hang out.”
The closest thing we had to an app back then was ICQ (I will forever hear that annoying chirping sound in my head whenever those three letters appear). Little did we know back then that those types of apps would become ubiquitous and start replacing some in-person interactions.
So, what put an end to such a popular spot? I’ve always wondered why Evie’s closed. I had moved away from home by the time Chris decided to turn off the big screen TV for the last time, so I was a little out of touch with my hometown. But apparently, says Chris, there were a few factors.
The first was a flood in 2001 that force him to close for almost two months. “They were repairing the roof,” he says. “And there was $140,000 damage…insurance paid for most of it, but I was still on the tag for quite a bit.”
If you weren’t sure what kind of a business owner Evie was, then here’s a hint: he still paid his staff the entire seven weeks he was closed. He reopened in the fall with a new energy and a new name: Evie’s Grill House.
But the flood was followed by another catastrophe, this one came in a suit and tie: his insurance broker informed him that his insurance was going up to $18,000/year, after they deemed his ratio of food-to-alcohol had gone from 70% food and 30% alcohol to 30% food and 70% alcohol. Many of us who went regularly, could attest to that ratio.
It may not be fair to say insurance killed his business, but it was a big factor in deciding whether renew his lease or not. “The insurance was just way too high,” he says. “I had to make a decision.” And after having his first son in 2002, his new family was another major factor in deciding to walk away from the hospitality industry. It’s difficult to be there all the time when you have young kids.
So, in February of 2003 Evie’s closed its doors. Like his grandparents before him, Evans had contributed to Owen Sound’s history and would be remembered.
“It’s too bad the way it ended,” he says. “But it was ten years in business. I was doing something right for awhile.”
I ask him what kind of advice he would give to a young restauranteur starting out? “It’s hard to give advice,” he says and thinks. “There’s still only 60 minutes in an hour,” he says, insinuating how difficult it is to turn a profit as a small business owner.
Has he ever been tempted to resurrect Evie’s in some form? Do it all again? “I think after I was done there, that was it….it was a lot of fun. I miss the people; I don’t miss the headaches.”
The lasting memories for me will always be sitting in the bleachers for the big game, meeting up on Thirsty Thursdays, and crowding into the round booths with friends you haven’t seen all week.
What will Chris Evans remember?
Gowan playing Strange Animal in ’95 on his first unplugged tour, forming friendships with guys like Kevin Weekes and Jamie Storr, renovating with his good friends, and most importantly the blood, sweat, and tears he put into his business for ten years.
A perfect ending to this story would have been for me to give Evie one of my coveted sports cards that he was eyeing up back in ’91 on my front lawn, but I’m not that clever, and sadly those are no longer with me either. They’ve gone missing over the years. And from what I’m told, they’re not that valuable anyways. I guess I should have offered them to Evie back then for a discount and put some money into my pockets for a summer’s worth of $2 beers and 10 cent wings.
Words by Jesse Wilkinson
Photos provided by Chris Evans, Andrew Given, Troy Gordon, and Matt Savage. Special thanks to Troy Folkerson.
