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This Hour Has 22 Minutes stole my thunder. In a viral sketch from the Canadian mock news show, a man harangues another to buy Canadian in light of Donald Trump’s trade war. “Boston Pizza. New York Fries. Basically, if there’s an American city in the name, it’s probably Canadian,” he jokes.
The list of Canadian restaurant chains with American names is as long as the names are absurd. “Boston Pizza”? Many American cities are known for their pizza: New York, Chicago, New Haven, Detroit. Not Boston. Listing these restaurants was a pandemic pastime for me. I was living in Ontario, and belatedly learning to drive. The roads were straight and empty, the landscape unremarkable. My attention turned to the region’s ubiquitous strip malls. That’s when I began to notice them.
There’s New Orleans Pizza — not gumbo or jambalaya, but pizza — a staple of rural Ontario towns. There’s Montana’s BBQ & Bar. Then there’s California Sandwiches. No shade here: their breaded veal cutlet sandwich, topped with hot peppers, provolone and aubergine, smothered in red sauce, served on a kaiser bun, is a masterpiece. Still, it has nothing to do with California.
There’s more: Lone Star Texas Grill, St Louis Bar & Grill, Philthy Philly’s, California Thai, State & Main. I became obsessed. How did these restaurants get their names? The few explanations I found were disappointingly arbitrary. Boston Pizza was chosen because . . . the word has six letters. California Sandwiches was chosen because . . . the owners’ daughters went to California once. I needed more. I dug through websites, sent emails, LinkedIn invitations, website queries, Facebook messages to the restaurants themselves. No response.
I changed course, tried to populate the other side of the ledger: restaurants with Canadian names. But the only Canadian-branded restaurant I could find was Tim Hortons, noting the irony that a coffeehouse named after a 1960s hockey player was owned by a Brazilian multinational. And to add insult to injury, its most popular donut is the Boston cream.
What does it mean? Nothing we don’t already know. Inundated with American culture, Canada lacks a strong identity, so American references resonate. The notion of a Vancouver Pizza, Halifax Sandwiches or Calgary Steakhouse is laughable.
Canada, overwhelmed by America yet defined as not-America. The border, a cultural kaleidoscope-cum-camera obscura projecting jumbled images of America on the scrim that is Canada.
Anyway, then came Trump’s trade war, and things changed. Suddenly all these restaurants are announcing that they are “proudly Canadian”. St Louis Bar & Grill even switched to the metric system; its wings now come in grams instead of pounds. It hasn’t changed its names, of course, but maybe it should consider it. Apparently, the biggest pizza chain in Cyprus is called Toronto Pizza.
Daniel Glassman is a Canadian writer living in London
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