At Harry’s diner, time for one last bite
After more than 50 years, this Parkdale institution enters its final chapter
Tommy Petropoulos sits on a stool at the bar of Harry’s Charboiled, the Parkdale diner he started with his two brothers in 1968, and sips a cup of coffee.
Beside him are rows of hot burgers, ready to be delivered to a bustling brunch crowd of 30somethings at nearby faded vinyl blue booths. There’s the Breakfast Burger (red chorizo, green tomato, garlic mayo, fried egg), Red burger (more red chorizo, cheese, pineapple, jalapeno mayo) and the veg burger (contains walnuts).
Petropoulos prefers to keep it simple if you ask him, just mustard, relish, onion, tomato and pickles.
“A hamburger is a hamburger,” the 79-year-old says with a laugh. “Where did they get this idea, mayonnaise? Everything mayonnaise.”
He doesn’t own Harry’s anymore — he sold it to restaurateur Grant van Gameren in 2016 — but he still drives down from Mississauga regularly for a coffee, or a burger.
The diner has been a Parkdale institution for 51 years, surviving the gentrification of the neighbourhood and the transition when van Gameren took over. But, as he announced last week, the doors will finally be closing in October, putting an end to its final chapter.
Van Gameren, the owner of Bar Raval, El Rey and several other bars and restaurants across the city, made a few tweaks to the menu. He changed up the burgers, added $10 avocado toast, cut the fluorescent lighting and hiked the prices a bit. They got an Instagram account. But classics (like the “usual” breakfast and “Plain Jane” burger) are still available. And the antlers of a moose Petropoulos’s brother George shot are still on the wall, along with pictures of the two of them and older brother Sam.
There’s always been a clause that the owner of the building could evict them within six months for demolition, van Gameren says, and with a high price tag for keeping it up (it needed new floors, for example), it just wasn’t worth it.
“It was no secret that they were planning to demo and develop,” he says.
“We knew it was short-lived, it was just a matter of how long.”
There has been a modest rent increase, but the landlords have been very reasonable, said the restaurateur, who was a regular even before he took it over, when he lived nearby on Jameson Ave.
When he bought it three years ago, many of the old customers were skeptical. “But what was really special was that we kept a lot of the old regulars to a point where you develop some really close relationships with a lot of people,” van Gameren says.
“Harry’s is an institution. We wanted to just continue to keep that fire burning for as long as we could.”
As for the future of the space: it’s unclear. The building’s owners did not a respond to a request from the Star.
Van Gameren hopes to incorporate the burgers into a new place at some point and offer them on food trucks starting in the spring for “version 2.0”
But he says he won’t be “picking up Harry’s Charboiled and moving it elsewhere,” saying that would be “an injustice to the history.”
“Harry’s Charboiled stays in that building and goes down with that building.”
Its story began when a teenage Petropoulos left the olive trees and clear blue waters of his village near Kalamata, Greece, for Canada in January 1957. After taking a 36-hour flight to Toronto from Athens via London and New York, he remembers how surprised he was to see snow.
“I was short and the snow was taller than I was,” he says, joking that he wanted to turn around and go back.
He got jobs at Harvey’s and CP Rail, and later opened a restaurant at McCaul and Dundas Sts. in the early ’60s.
Finally, near the end of the decade, after he married his wife, Nicky, Harry’s was born.
At first, the three brothers and their wives did it all themselves. They worked seven days a week, from 10 a.m. to 4 a.m., except Christmas and New Year’s, serving up hamburgers, french fries, milkshakes and Greek fare such as souvlaki and gyros. They got their liquor licence in 1977, the year Toronto got the Blue Jays.
“The first year was hard, you know,” Petropoulos says. “But we worked hard and things worked out for us.”
It’s easy to miss Harry’s if you’re not looking for it. It’s on the first floor of a commercial building on a side-street off King St. W. A collection of yellow shopping carts from the No Frills beside it lies near the entrance.
Many of the youngish customers packed into the diner for burgers and eggs on a recent Sunday had just discovered it in the last few years, they said. But they were eager to get in one last dance with “Plain Jane.”
“We’re sad,” said Ashley Wells, 35, digging into the “Harry’s usual” — eggs, home fries, toast and avocado.
“There’s no other place like this in Toronto,” she says. “It’s just the vibe.”
She and her boyfriend moved to Parkdale last winter, partly because of their “go-to breakfast place.”
“That was like a big draw. We were like, well we know Harry’s.”
At a nearby table, a Dragon boat team named Whiplash waits for their brunch after an early morning practice.
“We come here, mostly because of the food,” Ari Debnath says, and the “divey feel of it.”
“The unique burger types that they have, that’s why I love coming here.”
Debnath didn’t know the man at the bar in the checkered shirt was the original owner. But says “the charm” is what keeps him coming back.
He likes bringing new team members by, because “there’s that instant love for the place.”
Petropoulos says he probably won’t take much of the newer memorabilia, such as the stuffed beaver in a red T-shirt. Van Gameron plans to auction some of it off for charity at a party on the last night, Oct. 5, three years to the day since he took it over.
Petropoulos already has some stuff from before the transition including the original milkshake machine, which he sometimes takes out “for the grandchildren.”
He’s heading off soon to Greece for his yearly visit. But he’ll be back for the last day.
“We’d like to thank all the people,” he says, adding it’s hard for him to pick a favourite memory from over the years.
“Every day was good.”