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A longtime Calgary diner and nightclub – known equally for its ribs and its rock ‘n’ roll – was probably destroyed by an arsonist, authorities say.
But the Mecca Café, which caught fire early Friday morning, may not have seen the end of its 41-year history, its owners are quick to add.
“Are you going to walk away or are you going to want to rebuild?” Alain Rostoker said, recounting what his landlord – the provincial government – asked him after the fire was out.
“I said immediately: ‘We’ll rebuild,’” Rostoker said. “This is too valuable a piece of Calgary culture. There no place like it in Calgary or maybe even in Canada.”
Smashed windows and blackened interior walls were the most obvious signs of the fire at the West Valley Road diner. Some of the tables seemed intact, the serviettes still in their chrome holders and utensils still in place.
Long before it was known for its southern-style barbecue and for providing a home for several city musicians, the Mecca was a motel, built in 1956, called the Trans Canada Inn, Rostoker said.
The nearby Trans-Canada Highway was under construction then and a trolley car would connect Bowness with the inn, located beyond Calgary’s western fringes.
After the motel burned down in 1961, a cookhouse trailer set up shop on the site, serving mostly daytime meals to truckers. Even with additions to the trailer in the early ‘70s, the place remained tiny – with a capacity of not more than 20 tables.
In 2000, Rostoker and several other investors took over, adding southern-style barbecue to the Mecca’s menu.
At the same time, the new owners kept the venue’s simple charm.
“It’s an old roadhouse diner,” Rostoker said. “There’s nothing fancy inside. It would attract real people who would come for the food and the music and not the prettiness of it.”
The music was crucial to the Mecca’s evolution, said Bill Cowsill, rhythm guitarist and one of the founders of the Co-Dependents, a Calgary rock ‘n’ roll quartet.
When his group began performing at the Mecca about a year ago, attendance on performance nights went from about a dozen people to sold-out capacities of 120, said Cowsill, former member of The Cowsills family band in the 1960s (inspiration for the TV show The Partridge Family).
Along with other musicians, such as Tom Phillips and the Men of Constant Sorrow, who brought their country rock to the Mecca on Friday nights, the Co-Dependents became regulars, even recording a live album at the diner.
“The building has a wonderful ambience,” Cowsill said, describing the Mecca’s terra cotta-coloured exterior and chrome inside as “early Steinbeck.”
“I think it’s the wood, the structure, the way it’s built, the angles,” said Cowsill of what he liked of the Mecca.
Calgary Fir Department investigator Bob Wilson said he had eliminated natural and accidental causes for the Mecca fire. About a week previously one of the Mecca’s two braziers was reported stolen.
Wilson did not draw a connection between the theft and the fire, but after the latter event Cowsill couldn’t help but sound a bit deflated.
“It was just getting going, really,” he said of the Mecca. “Just starting to honk.”
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