The Paris Café - Est. 1917 Leask, SK
Small town cafés have always been an integral part of the history of communities throughout Canada. This is the story of one such establishment, the Paris Café, in Leask, Saskatchewan.
THE EARLY YEARS
A lady named Mrs. Game and her son, Monty, the first teacher in Leask, opened a café and rooming house in 1913. When Monty was killed in World War I, his mother sold the business and moved to Ontario in 1917.
Charles Mack Hun Sung Sr. was born in 1900 in Canton, China. He immigrated to Canada in 1912 with a relative and worked in Prince Albert. In 1917 he came to Leask and began operating the business as the Paris Café.
In 1922, Charles Sr. travelled by train to Vancouver, where he married Mah Fay Ping, who was born in 1908 in Canton, China. Together they returned to Saskatchewan to continue operating the café.
Fire destroyed the original building in 1928, but a new one was soon built in the same location. As the building had also been their home, the family, which consisted of three young girls and a three-day-old baby boy, lived with the Howe family in Marcelin during the construction.
Paris Café fire, 1928.
Charles Sr., Fay Ping and their family, which grew to include twenty-one children, all worked in the café.
Charles Sr. spoke English, but Fay Ping was not fluent in the language and was most comfortable working in the kitchen.
The kids helped out in different capacities; waiting tables, doing dishes, cooking, cleaning, unloading delivery trucks and looking after younger siblings. In later years, their grandchildren helped out as well. Charles Sr. also ran a radio repair shop out of a small room at the back of the building.
According to the local constable of the day, the western pronunciation of their last name was McHanson (Mack Hun Sung). Two of the kids, Leo and his brother, Leslie, eventually legally changed their name to McHanson.
THE NEXT GENERATION
When Charles Sr. passed away in 1951, his oldest son, Leo, who was twenty-three at the time, ran the café and radio repair business and helped raise his younger siblings. Fay Ping passed away in 1964.
Leo’s brother, Charlie, who was born in 1933, took over running the café in the mid-sixties and purchased the business in 1975.
Leo continued his radio repair business next door in the old post office building, eventually expanding into selling hardware.
Part of Main Street Leask circa 1970s Left to right - Hotel Windsor (not in view), Drug Store, Jerry’s Barber Shop, McHanson Home Hardware, old hardware building, Paris Café, Spriggs Meats.
A new hardware store was built in 1985. Leo’s son, Robert and his wife, Jo-Anne, worked in the business with his parents starting in 1976 and eventually took over the business. Leo passed away in 2014, and his wife Sue in 2016. In 2015, the building was purchased by the Village of Leask.
CHARLIE’S
As kids, we stopped at the Paris Café with our parents to get treats, and as teenagers, we gathered there after school activities and on weekends to eat fries and gravy and plan our lives. To us, it was simply “Charlie’s.”
To enter the café, you went through an outside door into a tiny vestibule and then through an inside door. A red jukebox filled with 45s (45 rpm 7” records) sat to the left with the till and confectionery area to the right. He briefly had small tabletop jukeboxes on a few tables, and later a pinball machine was installed.
Bags of potato chips were clipped to metal wall display racks. A low counter lined with red leather and chrome diner stools provided seating for solo patrons. A double row of red leather booths ran down the restaurant's centre, three booths on each side of a partition. Tables along the far wall and in front of the street view window provided additional seating.
Tubs of ice cream were stored in a freezer behind the counter. Pies were tantalizingly displayed, awaiting a generous scoop of ice cream before being served. A milkshake machine sat on the counter with dishes and glasses on shelves below.
The upstairs living quarters apparently consisted of a dining room with a veranda overlooking the backyard and a sitting room at the front overlooking Main Street. A fire escape led down to the backyard. Five bedrooms and a bathroom completed the layout.
It embodied all the characteristics of a small-town café, with a comfortable familiarity amongst the regular patrons who came to the restaurant daily like clockwork. When someone new walked in, discussions ensued at each table as to their purpose for being in the village. On occasion, one of the regulars would venture over to ask who they were and why they were in town and then report the information back to the other tables.
CHARLIE’S ANGELS
I worked at the Paris Café as a waitress in the summer of 1978 before entering grade eleven. That was the closest I ever came to spending a summer in Paris. I remember how nervous I was asking Charlie for a job. He indicated that he had enough help but would try and give me some shifts, and he did. The local boys jokingly called us waitresses “Charlie’s Angels,” referring to the television series that ran from 1976 - 1981; they thought they were so clever.
Charlie was a bachelor, and he lived above the restaurant where he grew up. Papers and random items, on their way up or down, lined the outer sides of each step with a well-worn path visible in the middle.
I’m an autumn baby, so I was still fifteen and didn’t have a driver's license that summer. My dad faithfully dropped whatever he was doing on the farm to drive me to work. The parking spots in front of the café were full at noon, so he would quickly stop and drop me off on the street and carry on.
When I worked at the café, the building was already fifty years old, but the structure was made of brick and mortar and had stood the test of time. Equipment upgrades over the years had modernized it. The Paris Café sign that had once hung front and centre had deteriorated and was taken down; only the sign pole remained jutting out. A thin bamboo blind hung from the front window.
I braved going down to the dimly lit basement once to get some restocking items. The basement was the only place for stock storage, so everything had to be hauled down and eventually lugged back up. I remember pop piled to the low ceiling and big boxes filled with individual bags of potato chips, cartons of cigarettes and tobacco and smaller boxes of chocolate bars and candy.
Waitressing was hot, exhausting, hard work, but it was fun as a couple of my friends also worked there. The learning curve was steep as it was my first job. I had babysat a bit for neighbours, but that was the extent of my employment experience. Many people worked for Charlie over the years as waitresses and cooks. Even though they were of different ages, they bonded through this shared experience.
We took orders on our order pads and then clipped them to a food order wheel in the kitchen. In its heyday, the kitchen was a bustling place with a deep fryer, stove and grill cranking out meals. For years dishes were washed by hand with soap and scalding hot water. When I worked there, waitresses brought a steady stream of dirty dishes to the kitchen, where they were loaded into an industrial dishwasher.
We were often run off our feet serving meals, clearing tables, collecting payments and selling confectionery items and ice cream. Minors were allowed to sell cigarettes then, and patrons puffed away freely in the café. When my shift was over, I left smelling of cigarette and cigar smoke and deep fryer and grill grease. There were many customers: local people, construction workers, business people and travellers. It was hard to get a table on some days.
When we cleared tables, we found small tips. It wasn't common to receive large ones; there wasn't a percentage expected like there is today. The travellers or construction workers were our best hope for gratuities. We kept the tips from the tables we served; there wasn’t a communal tip jar.
I recall filling napkin, sugar, ketchup, salt and pepper containers during the slow hours and restocking pop, candy, chips and cigarettes. Waitresses weren’t keen on making milkshakes during busy hours as the process was messy, noisy and time-consuming.
Charlie was good to his staff. He was a jokester who liked to tease, and he had a great sense of humour; his customers loved him. He moved about quickly and efficiently, bursting through the two sets of swinging doors that separated the customer area from the bathrooms and the kitchen. He would survey the tables and greet the customers with a big smile before darting back into the kitchen.
He did a lot of the cooking but also hired cooks to work the busy midday hours during the week. The cook when I worked there was named Rosie. She was a small, feisty lady with a big smile. Rosie was an excellent cook, and she moved around the kitchen like a tiny whirlwind; it wasn’t her first rodeo. The weekday noon specials were full course feasts that included soup, a drink and dessert. You even got a glass of water without having to ask for it. Those were the days.
THE END OF AN ERA
The Paris Café closed in the late eighties; Charlie continued to reside there until 1995. He passed away that year in Saskatoon; he was sixty-two. The building was demolished in 1996 along with the old hardware store and the original Spriggs Meats building to make way for a medical clinic/office complex.
Part of Main Street Leask, 2021. Left to right - Bramshott Spirits, IG Wealth Management, Ace Hardware (two buildings), Leask Village Office, Woodland Pharmacy, Medical Clinic, Lori Saam Hair and Healing.
They say you never forget your first love or your first job. I certainly will never forget my summer at the Paris Café.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND REFLECTIONS
I want to thank Charles Sr. and Fay Ping’s grandchildren (Leo and Sue’s children), Roberta, Janet and Robert, for helping with the research for this story. Your insight, memories and pictures helped bring this story to life.
Thank you also to all who shared recollections of the Paris Café with me during casual conversations and through social media over the past few months; here are some of those memories:
● Local teens showing up at the café during off hours looking for something to eat and Charlie, in jest, saying, “why don’t you go the .... home and eat?”
● They served the best french fries
● At one point, the menu offered plain white or vanilla ice cream as two options
● A couple of girls were looking through 45s that had been changed out of the jukebox, and one of the girls picked up a record by Kenny Rogers with the song Something’s Burning on it and said, “something’s burning”, Charlie ran out of the kitchen yelling, “where?”, the girl held up the record, and he returned to the kitchen muttering something about crazy kids
● Owners and employees from other businesses going daily to join coffee row on their breaks
Charlie was good friends with my husband's parents and their social group. In the mid-sixties, the stores in Leask stayed open on Saturday nights, and the café was open until eleven. It was customary for these families to gather in town on weekends. The women picked up groceries while the men secured a spot in the beer parlour. When the women finished shopping, and their groceries were stowed in the vehicle, they went to the beer parlour as well. There was still a men’s side and a women’s side at that time so they couldn’t sit with their husbands. They probably didn’t mind visiting as a group of ladies and letting the men talk about hunting, fishing and farming on their side.
The kids played outside, eventually waiting in the vehicle or gathering upstairs at Charlie’s, where he would let them watch a movie until their parents came to collect them. He sometimes joined their parents at the parlour and his brother, George, watched the kids. The evening was often capped off with Charlie cooking food for the group back at the café. When I imagine this scene, I can almost smell the french fries and hear the laughter.
Norma Galambos
NORMA GALAMBOS is a Canadian entrepreneur, blogger, freelance writer and podcast host from Leask, Saskatchewan. Visit Norma Galambos Lifestyle here.
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