By Shelley Boettcher.
A six-foot octopus carcass floating through muddy water isn’t what most people saw during the June floods in Southern Alberta.
But for one Calgary restaurant, it was reality.
The basement and wine cellar of River Café were badly damaged that week. The force of the floodwaters knocked over massive freezers, blew open doors and sent frozen foodstuffs floating — including whole prosciuttos, a lamb carcass and an octopus. Frozen, it was manageable. Thawed and bobbing in the river, not so much.
“When they unravel, they are big and slimy, five or six feet in diameter,” says Sal Howell, the restaurant’s owner. “And when these things deteriorate, they deteriorate fast.”
The beast is history, now, and for many, so is the flood.
But for others in the food and wine industry in southern Alberta, the flood has left lasting reminders. Some lost jobs, equipment, stock and, of course, income as Calgary’s downtown was without electricity for days and in a few cases, months.
“We didn’t flood, but we were closed for seven days,” says Liana Robberecht, a former Edmontonian who has been the Calgary Petroleum Club’s executive chef for more than a decade.
“It was a huge financial hit.”
While a lucky few bounced back quickly from the disaster, others are still struggling to rebuild. Here are some of their stories.
Sal Howell, River Café and Boxwood
Many Calgarians received extra help from their neighbours to the north, and, in fact, Sal Howell was one. On the Friday after the flood, she went to see the damage at River Café. Police tape cordoned off the only entrance left to the island, but she ducked under to try to get a closer look.
“These police officers were shouting at me to get out of the way, so I went over and introduced myself. I was panicking — we were starting to hear stories about looters, too,” she recalls.
The officers turned out to be Edmonton police, who were stationed around Calgary’s Eau Claire area. One gave her his card — although she has since misplaced it — and promised to update her. “I stayed in touch with him throughout the day, and he was so helpful,” she says. “It was such a relief.”
Boxwood re-opened in early July, and River Café re-opened in mid-August. Despite six feet of water in the basement, there was no damage to River Café’s main floor.
But Howell lost much of her legendary wine collection, including irreplaceable vintages of Burgundy from the 1970s and 1980s, a decade of Ridge Montebello, Domaine Huet Vouvray dating back to 1947, and other treasures.
“I’d love to build a wine cellar next time that is watertight like a submarine,” she says.
“We just keep thinking of what would help us go faster next time around, if there is a next time around. We don’t intend to go anywhere.”
Tony and Penny Marshall, Highwood Crossing
Tony and Penny Marshall, the couple behind Highwood Crossing, farm and, until the flood, operated a shop in High River, south of Calgary. They sell their organic, nut-free flours, granola, flaxseed, canola oil and rolled oats across Canada.
On June 20, they were on a flight to Toronto for a prestigious Ace Bakery celebration of top Canadian food producers. Three hours later, when they landed, they were “inundated with emails, text messages, voice messages from our friends and our kids,” Marshall recalls.
“People were all saying, ‘High River’s flooded. Are you OK?’”
They were safe, but their home and business were not. The shop — with the ovens used to make the granola — was destroyed, as well as the storage facilities, the barn and hayshed. And their farmhouse was hit with a wall of silt-filled water that wrecked everything in its path.
Yet the damage to the land hurts Marshall the most.
“The most difficult thing for me is that we lost so much land from the erosion. We probably lost five acres. It’s just gone. Gone,” he says.
“And another 40 acres was flooded out. My family has been farming here for 120 years, and a flood has never happened to this extent.”
Phoebe Fung, Vin Room
The floodwaters were still pouring into Vin Room Mission, one of Calgary’s top wine bars, when co-proprietor Phoebe Fung started booking tradespeople for the inevitable repairs.
“I said, ‘Will I see you when the water stops?’” she recalls.
“I come from oil and gas. Down time is not an option.”
Her foresight paid off, as her crews worked 24 hours a day, and the place reopened only three weeks after the flood. The feat is perhaps even more impressive considering the basement and main floor were both wrecked. Fung’s renowned wine cellar, the heritage building’s original hardwood, the heating, all electrical work and the antique brick walls — which she lovingly had restored five years ago — were all destroyed.
“Our 113-year-old brick has been traded in for its younger cousin: 70-year-old brick,” she says.
Those touches mean that these days, if you walk in to the wine bar, you’ll find it’s business as usual: the long wall of enomatic dispensers features plenty of fine wines and the ambiance is as warm and welcoming as ever.
“I call it ‘the new normal,’” she says. “If you come in here now, it will seem like the flood never happened.”
Unless, of course, you look out the window and see the construction still going on at the neighbouring businesses. Or businesses that are still mud-splattered and empty.
Geoff Last, Bin 905
Across the street from Vin Room, Bin 905 was hit particularly hard. All of the building’s electrical systems are in the basement, and the replacement systems had to be special-ordered.
Staff frantically tried to rescue wines from the basement storage the day of the evacuation, but thousands of bottles were written off, covered in what Geoff Last, the store’s manager, calls “primordial ooze.”
“We lost a quarter million dollars of inventory,” he says, including two irreplaceable bottles of Screaming Eagle, worth about $1,700 apiece. Smashed.
Still, the flood brought out the best side of Calgarians, he says. Customers showed up to clean and schlep bottles out of the basement, and even rival liquor storeowners called to offer help.
“It brought out the best in people.”
As for Last, he’s selling wine out of the trunk of his car. He had to lay off a couple of staff; others are helping at a makeshift retail location at the southeast warehouse.
He hopes the store will reopen before Christmas, crucial for retail sales. “If there can be a silver lining to this, it’s that we have the opportunity to redesign the store to be really unique,” he says. “We will reopen, better than ever.”
Grant Parry, Wurst
Pardon the terrible pun, but Wurst sustained some of the worst damage during the flood. Most commercial buildings have their electrical systems in the basement, but Wurst — a popular Bavarian-style restaurant and beer hall — also had its kitchen and its bar.
It was filled with nine to 10 feet
of mud.
Still, executive chef Grant Parry notes, things could be worse. Insurance has covered staff wages. And the day of the evacuation, a fellow chef “had the foresight to grab everyone’s knives and take them to the upstairs bar,” he says. A chef with his knives can always find work.
Parry still sounds overwhelmed, even as he discusses his new venture, Bocce, a pizza place owned by the same family behind Wurst. The plan is to open them both in November, he says, and he’ll then move to that new job.
“We’re still busy. It’s just different.”
Food and wine writer Shelley Boettcher lives on high ground in Calgary, and spent the week of the flood helping friends and family who weren’t so lucky. Her book Uncorked: The Definitive Guide to Alberta’s Best Wines $25 and Under, third edition, is in stores this fall.