Owners, diners mourn The Snack

JOHN THOMPSON

Iqaluit’s fast food lovers are in mourning, after The Snack, their beloved fast food restaurant, burned down Thursday morning last week.

Fittingly, grease appears to have killed the popular diner and 24-hour take-out delivery service, after the business has done so much to help keep customers fed with Snackburgers and fries slathered with cheese curds and gravy.

The owners of the lucrative business promise to re-open as soon as possible. But as of press-time, few details were available.

Iqaluit’s fire department received a phone call around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday last week, reporting a kitchen fire inside the building. Within six minutes, firefighters were on the scene, says fire chief Greg Jewers.

At that time, flames had spread from the kitchen, out the rear exit, and had begun to creep up the outside wall.

Firefighters entered the building and extinguished most the fire inside the kitchen, Jewers says.

But fire had also spread into the crawl space above the ceiling. Black smoke, rich with unburned carbon, continued to fill into the ceiling space as well.

Shortly after 1:00 a.m., Jewers says this mixture of fire and unburned fuel ignited, creating an explosion.

“One of the guys said it sounded like a freight train coming,” Jewers says.

The two firefighters inside the building at the time escaped without injury.

But by 4 a.m., the building was a lost cause. From then on, firefighters focused on dousing down neighbouring buildings, such as Arctic Ventures, the Nunavut Employees Union building, and an adjacent furniture store, to prevent the fire from spreading further.

Water that spilled from the scene backed up plugged culverts and flooded the nearby Grind and Brew Café’s parking lot, where an ATV could be seen nearly submerged that morning.

Residents stopped to stare at the demise of the restaurant throughout the morning, only to be shooed off by firefighters if caught crossing the taped-off perimeter.

Firefighters remained on scene until 4:30 p.m. Thursday afternoon. But in the end, all that remained from the firefighters’ efforts was a smoldering pile of charred wood and melted metal roofing, coated with icicles.

It didn’t take long for rumours to circulate throughout town that firefighters had prematurely left the scene early Thursday morning, believing the fire was under control. Jewers dismisses this: “There was no question of us leaving the scene.”

Jewers says he will have a better idea of how the fire started by late this week, after the deadline of this newspaper.

The Snack was more than a greasy-spoon diner – it was an institution. Its loss is perhaps rivaled only by the burning of St. Jude’s Anglican cathedral last year, which deprived the city of its most prominent landmark and place of worship.

No longer can hungover residents stumble inside the dimly-lit building and sink into one of the vinyl-seated booths for a plate of fried eggs and bacon on white bread.

No longer can city truck drivers park their vehicles in a long line outside the joint during coffee breaks. Now the drivers must disperse into small groups at the city’s remaining coffee shops.

No longer can residents satisfy a late-night craving for comfort food, or a pack of smokes, at any hour with a phone call, thanks to a small fleet of delivery vehicles.

When the world’s largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380, arrived for its second bout of cold-weather testing in Iqaluit on Monday, airport manager John Graham was quick to apologize to the flight crew, explaining they could no longer enjoy all-hours service from The Snack.

The coffee was bad, but that didn’t matter. No other dining spot in Iqaluit offered as much character, and as little pretension, as The Snack, which offered a street-level view of the lives of Iqaluit’s blue-collar workers who congregated there.

The diner was distinctly Québecois, beginning with the sign that warned, with unmistakably French idiom, “We will not tolerate anyone hanging around,” which hung in the entrance.

Step inside and you might hear a Sarah McLachlan album playing over the chatter, mostly in French and Inuktitut, of the city’s electricians, plumbers and municipal workers.

It was the only place you could order a real clubhouse sandwich, with actual roasted chicken, rather than sliced deli meat. That’s what fire chief Jewers will miss the most.

The Snack first opened during the early 1980s, originally located behind where the new Nova hotel now stands, beside a lot that now holds the Igluvut building. Besides serving food, the building contained pool tables and arcade games, and proved a popular hang-out for teenagers.

That building also burned to the ground, on Jan. 31, 1994.

Five years later, in May 1999, Claude Caza, who then owned the business, pleaded guilty to setting the fire and defrauding insurance companies of $170,000.

Caza also pleaded guilty at that time to importing some 200 kilograms of hashish into Iqaluit between Jan. 1995 and March 1998.

Caza’s drug pushing turned The Snack into a symbol of depravity, to a point where about 30o residents marched on the restaurant in the summer of 1994, waving placards, to protest the presence of drugs, among other problems, in Iqaluit.

By the time of Caza’s conviction, The Snack business had already been frozen under proceeds of crime legislation, because he had invested drug money in the business.

Caza was ordered to pay $500,000 in restitution. Shortly afterwards, the Snack property was acquired by Nelson Soucy and Gilles Lacroix, who both live outside Iqaluit, in Quebec City and Montreal.