Requiem for the greasy spoon

Re: Golf course idea quashed (April 21, The Chronicle Herald).

Congratulations and thanks to Natural Resources and Renewables Minister Tory Rushton and to the rest of cabinet for clearly and unequivocally rejecting the proposal to lease a third of Inverness County’s West Mabou Beach Provincial Park to private interests for another luxury golf course.

Instead, this fully designated provincial park, including its two-kilometre sandy beach and its trail system, will continue to perform its twin functions of conserving threatened biodiversity

and providing an important outdoor recreational opportunity for the public.

TAYLOR COLUMNS FIT FOR SCHOOL

Are Scott Taylor’s columns in The Chronicle Herald included in our country’s high school curriculums? Or elementary grades? If not, why not?

I am cutting them out and putting them together in case there are some teachers who want to teach what is important in today’s world. Even if they just learn what and where NATO is or that some of the European nations do not have a beach.

Carole Morris-Underhill, Editor/Reporter carole.morris-underhill @saltwire.com 902-799-1077

I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the Maritimes and in particular the Annapolis Valley — with its abundance of locally grown foods and fine wines — have become an epicentre of epicurean delights.

But as an old neighbour of mine once said, “You couldn’t fire a shot gun along the Valley without hitting several of those fancy, newfangled restaurants.”

Since my wife and I frequent several of the establishments he was referring to, I might have taken exception to his attitude, but I didn’t. I knew he was remembering simpler times and longing for the type of places he once felt at home in.

He couldn’t quite put a name to the kind of places he missed but I, being a former city dweller remembering The Spot One Grill and The Chinese Restaurant across the road from it in Toronto, could have helped him with a label.

UNIVERSAL MONIKER

We don’t know who the first person was who lofted an item of an eatery’s cutlery up to study it in better light and, spying a thin grey film all over it, decided that the institution and those like it should henceforth be known as greasy spoons. We’ll never know but the term became an almost universal assignation.

Sadly, most of the of these interesting albeit seedy cafés have all but gone the way of the dodo bird (a bird they would have willingly cooked and served had they still been available and the price right).

I say this, tongue in cheek, because I’m informed that many years ago (I’m talking specifically about the Depression years) the menus of many of the small restaurants in the Maritimes were dependent on any inexpensive wild game the cooks could get their hands on.

It was hoped that all the deer, moose, bear and the varied wild fowl that made their way to their kitchens had been legally hunted and not acquired roadside on the way to the restaurant — but who would know or care once it was in the stew pot and tasting absolutely delicious?

COMFORT FOOD

That aside, as I recall, in the 1970s, after strict new rules came into effect, there were still a few places in the area where you could still get a good, old-fashioned meat and potato meal at a reasonable price.

These were not fancy establishments, far from it, they had the atmosphere

IMPORTANT MATTERS DESERVE PUBLIC DEBATE

It is unacceptable that both the provincial minister and the MLA for Mabou kept the constituents of Mabou on tenterhooks for six months while the department “waited for an application” that never came. The entire debacle feels like cronyism.

Consider Minister Tory Rushton’s statement: “There was no application, it was just a conversation.”

How many of us are privy to “just a conversation” with a minister or staff? And it took six months for staff to figure out that “there is no mechanism to allow a golf course to move forward in a park or protected area”?

Until loophole-free legislation is passed, the battle to protect and defend public parks and Crown land will continue. It might even be suggested that a minister not be granted final decision powers.

Such deeply impacting matters require a much larger consensus and public debate. You never know if cronyism is at the bottom of it all.

EROSION APPROACH LACKS COMMON SENSE

of a down home kitchen.

The meat was a trifle tough, the vegetables overcooked and the coffee reprehensible, but the overall setting and the company was so convivial that you could overlook the small deficiencies in the offerings on the menu.

Comfort food in a comfortable environment.

We still referred to these places as greasy spoons, but the name had become a term of endearment.

In fact, even though the name suggests something that can no longer be delivered, several companies in the U.S. are competing for the use of the name for their highend restaurants in the big cities.

The days of bellying up to the lunch bar for 25-cent ham and cheese sandwich or squeezing into a booth for a dime banana split or nickel root beer float at the end of a heavy meal are just memories now.

And if, by the way of a compliment, I ever told the owner of any of the establishments I now attend that I thought of the place as my favourite greasy spoon, he would take it the wrong way and escort me to the door.

Garry Leeson, who lives in Harmony, is author of The Dome Chronicles, about his career in the Toronto Metropolitan Police and his move back to rural Nova Scotia.

Coastal erosion and flooding have been occurring for at least three billion years. With this in mind, insurers are rightly not covering properties that are subject to this problem, and neither should the taxpayer (Editorial, The Chronicle Herald, April 15).

The government’s plan to bail out these people will just exacerbate the problem by rebuilding residences where coastal erosion and flooding are already an established fact. Instead of helping these people perpetuate this problem, the government should state that buildings will be removed from zones prone to such dangers.

It is not in the purview of the taxpayer to perpetually subsidize the selfish actions of citizens who fail to exercise good judgment.

The long-term solution is to remove people and bulldoze structures in flood zones and coastal erosion areas and prevent any building from occurring in those areas, thereby ending the interminable taxpayer bailouts.