CHEAP STEAK NO MORE
After 25 years east Van’s Brave Bull closes its doors.
Long an east Vancouver favourite for its $ 10 sirloins, The Brave Bull’s House of Steaks will close on Sunday.
The family restaurant on the corner of Clark Drive and Hastings Street East has been serving steak, seafood and more since 1985. Owners Linda and Frank Lum have sold the building to a developer and plan to retire.
Besides its prices, the Brave Bull is known for its dilapidated exterior. The words House of Steaks are faded on the storefront, the yellow awnings look as though they haven’t been washed in years and the moulded white columns are left over from when the building was a Greek restaurant. If not for a sandwich board advertising breakfast — coffee break — lunch — dinner, people might assume it’s been shut down already.
But inside, the restaurant is neat and clean and homey. The décor includes landscape paintings, hanging plants and Chinese lanterns. And business, while not busy, is steady, with several tables occupied Wednesday evening.
One couple at the restaurant, Nicole Williams and Al Fowler, said they used to come once a week before they moved to Vernon. They were disappointed to learn the Brave Bull would serve its last $ 10 sirloin on Sunday.
“It’s good food, and it’s cheap,” said Williams. “You can’t get a steak that cheap anywhere else.”
Frank, 78, does the cooking and Linda, 75, manages and waits tables.
They’ve been running the restaurant on their own for years, working seven days a week and only going on vacation twice since they opened.
Faye Lum, the Lums’ daughter, said there were a few signs that it was time for her parents to shut down the Brave Bull.
Last year, Frank was diagnosed with colon cancer and they closed for a year. Then, a car ran into the side of the building. And 1 ½ years ago, Linda was mugged and knocked unconscious as she and Frank were leaving the restaurant for the night.
“We tried to convince her to take a couple of weeks off, but she said ‘ I’m only taking two days off,’ ” Faye said.
Frank and Linda are both originally from southern China. Frank immigrated in 1954 and Linda in 1959. They met in Vancouver through Frank’s grandparents and married in 1959.
The Brave Bull is the Lums’ third restaurant. Their first was a Chinese- Canadian restaurant, Lum’s, in Port Coquitlam. The second was a diner called Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Kingsway at Main.
In the Brave Bull’s heyday, during Expo 86, the restaurant was managed by their son Dennis and the Lums had a staff of four waitresses.
When the Brave Bull first opened, the sirloin steak was $ 6.99. In a 1995 photo of the restaurant, a sign advertises a sirloin steak for $ 8.99.
Linda said the Brave Bull has regular customers. “Some of them ask me, ‘ Linda, where will I go for a low- price steak?’ I tell them, I don’t know.”
A filet mignon at the Brave Bull today costs $ 14.95. At the Gotham Steakhouse on Seymour Street downtown, it’s $ 49.95.
“It’s my dad’s stubbornness,” Faye said. “He felt he had to keep the prices low for the customers. My mom and the family agreed prices should go up. It took many years for them to just separate the taxes from the price of the meal.”
Her parents don’t work at the restaurant for the money any more, she said.
“It’s something they like to do. Their hobbies are limited. They like to garden. They get up at 6 o’clock in the morning to work on the garden, then they go to work. The only difference in the last five or six years is they have to have a nap. If they don’t, they say they can’t work the evening shift.”
“I’m old, I can’t take that much work,” Linda said.
Asked what they planned to do after retiring from the restaurant business, Linda pointed to the hanging plants inside the Brave Bull.
“I’m going to work in the garden,” she said. “I’m going to plant a big garden.”