In 2022, a family-run restaurant is a rare thing, and a fourth-generation family-run restaurant is practically unheard of. There’s a reason for that.
The Commodore opened on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton in 1942. The owners, the late Fong Chun and Ting Gee, were not part of the wave of immigrants who created Canadian Chinese food. Initially, they served all the things you’d expect to find on a diner menu — cheeseburgers, shakes and cherry pie, as well as sardines on toast and devilled eggs. Eventually, their son Wally took over with his wife, Sun Hee (Sunny). When Wally and Sunny’s sons were born, they grew up in the restaurant. David, the eldest, worked there off and on until he bought the place from his parents in 1997, and his daughter, Meagan, joined him on the line until she quit during the second lockdown of 2020. He’s still there. So are his folks.
When I visited this past summer, Wally, 86, was washing dishes during a Saturday brunch. He’d take the occasional break, sitting in a vinyl kitchen chair by the doorway, hands resting on his cane as he peered out at the customers in the dining room. Sunny, 84, was there, too, bustling around the kitchen in a pink golf shirt, her eagle eye overseeing every aspect of service. The photos on the wall near the kitchen show the two of them with baby David by the back door of the original restaurant. (The restaurant was rebuilt after a 1971 fire, which is when Wally and Sunny decided to revamp the menu and feature Chinese Canadian dishes for the first time.)
![UNEXPECTED CANADA - COMMODORE](https://s3.amazonaws.com/zweb-s3.uploads/ez2/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/HR_IMG_0163.jpg)
David, 62, is in front of the stove in a black apron, frying bacon for a clubhouse, and plating eggs sunny side up. He hurries past, ferrying a plate of fried rice to a table, greeting customers along the way.
There are two people missing from the Commodore staff: David’s wife, Wilma (Willi), 68, and their daughter Meagan, 30. Before the pandemic, they were all at the diner, a place renowned for its longevity as much as its hot turkey sandwiches.
“It is arguably one of the only old-time, café-style Chinese restaurants left in Edmonton. It certainly is the only one left in the city centre,” Linda Tzang, a former Royal Alberta Museum curator, wrote for a 2012 exhibit, Chop Suey on the Prairies, now posted on the Commodore’s website.
She notes Jun Gee, one of the first Chinese men from Canton in southern China to arrive in Edmonton in the 1890s, opened the city’s first Chinese laundry. His son, Fong Chun, arrived in 1920 and, as we know, he didn’t follow in his dad’s footsteps, but the rest of his family followed in his, longer than anyone could have expected.
“My grandparents actually had quite a few restaurants,” says David. “Back then, in the ’30s and the ’40s, a lot of the Chinese would go in together to help each other out. So, he was actually partners with a bunch of other people in a bunch of other restaurants.”
The family legacy has been a news hook over the years, evidenced by the clippings on the wall, and never more than when Meagan, who went to George Brown College and cooked for a few years in Toronto restaurants, took over as chef in 2012, becoming the fourth generation to participate in the family dynasty. Alas, it couldn’t hold; the pressures of the pandemic have changed all of us, the Gees as much as anyone. Meagan loves the Commodore — it’s where she grew up, after all — but she can’t work there anymore. The societal changes of the last five years — from #MeToo to BLM to the pandemic — have all worked on her in a way.
I spent a decade of my working life in restaurant kitchens, and I have covered the restaurant beat for most of my writing career. I saw firsthand how restaurant workers mobilized to demand better conditions. Less a case of “no one wants to work anymore” than the working class seeing the untenability of their situation — hard labour in precarious employment, with no benefits or sick days, taking place in, more often than not, a patriarchal hierachy resistant to change — many decided they simply weren’t going to take it anymore.
Lockdowns set a lot of people free, and Meagan is one of them.
“It was the first time I’ve had off since 2012. It really gave me a perspective shift,” she says. “I was processing all of the stuff I had experienced since starting in the industry. How toxic and problematic and stressful it can be to be a marginalized person in the industry. It all kind of hit at once and I realized, maybe this isn’t the future for me.” She still loves cooking, she just doesn’t want to do it for a living anymore.
Four generations have shepherded the Commodore, but it hasn’t been easy.