Paula E. Kirman
Ritz Diner Bar and Grill, previously located at 15135 Stony Plain Road, usually known as “the Ritz,” became a destination for authentic ‘50s ambiance, diner food, ice cream treats, and live music provided by local bands and seasoned professionals alike.
Steve Segal opened the Ritz, which he co-owned with his now ex-wife Linda, in the ‘80s. A self-described “West End guy,” Segal grew up in Crestwood. Jasper Place was nearby and made an impression on him.
“My favourite bar in high school was across the street from the Ritz, the Klondiker Hotel. I actually operated a couple of businesses [in Jasper Place]. I had a building next door to the Klondiker Hotel just one door east, and operated a video arcade there. It was a big building. I sold the building and then relocated the video arcade to the shopping centre where the Ritz Diner evolved,” he explains.1
“To increase my business, I got into the ice cream business. So I had the video arcade in the back and I opened up an ice cream store in the front where we had two dipping cabinets and 30 flavours of ice cream. That went really well in the summer, but summer became fall and fall became winter, and I realized the people didn’t want to get in their car and drive to get an ice cream cone in December.”
As a result, Segal decided to expand his business into a restaurant in the early ’80s. The Ritz had a genuine ’50s diner motif, complete with a long lunch counter and chrome stools, and booths with individual jukeboxes.
“How the Ritz evolved was, there was a ‘50s-style restaurant in Southgate Mall called Joe’s Diner, that was owned by Cara, which is a large restaurant chain. They were auctioning off their equipment; so I went and bought all the equipment. Had it been a Chinese restaurant, I might’ve gone in there and bought everything, and Ritz would’ve been something else. But we bought all their equipment. So I had the booths, I built the long chrome counter, but I had the chrome stools. I had a friend who had jukeboxes and had those small jukeboxes that went onto the booths. So it really evolved into a very authentic ‘50s motif,” Segal explains.
Live music was a mainstay of the Ritz. “It was just down the street from Grant MacEwan Community College that had a very robust music faculty,” Segal recalls. “A lot of my servers were students who became the performing musicians. So that’s kind of how it just all evolved, really taking advantage of the neighbourhood and the College and other components that were part of Jasper Place.”
Musician Chris Budnarchuk studied drums at MacEwan and played in a band called Edgware Road. He reminisced in an interview with the Jasper Place Community History Project’s Brooke Leifso:
One time my family came to have burgers and watch us play and they brought my grandfather. It was particularly embarrassing as we were rather loud with the guitar guys amps turned way up. So my grandfather sat right at the front plugging his ears so he could hear the details and everyone making jokes about him. Those gigs were very intimate as the audience was close and the stage was about five inches high so not very big. We were basically on the same level as the audience.”2
MacEwan music students weren’t the only musicians who played the Ritz. Local legends Idyl Tea and Jr. Gone Wild performed there, as did well-known Canadian group Doug and the Slugs. The most famous band reputed to have entertained Ritz diners is Green Day, early in their career.
Another accomplished musician whose early career days included a gig at the Ritz is Maria Dunn, who won a 2022 Juno Award for Best Traditional Roots Album. Dunn’s first public performance as part of a folk/roots band was at the Ritz in 1990. “I wasn’t performing any of my own songs, except an additional verse or two I had written to extend the song ‘I wanna marry a lighthouse keeper’,” she recalls.3
Howie Winestock honed his skills as a drummer at the Ritz in a band called “Where’s The River?” Winestock grew up in West Meadowlark and attended Jasper Place High School for one year before moving to Laurier Heights and switching to Ross Sheppard Composite High School, “Steve Segal made the best chocolate banana milkshakes ever,” he says. “And when I walked in the door with all my drum kit and hardware, he’d have a milkshake ready and waiting for me, before we even exchanged greetings. I think there were times I played the Ritz just for the milkshakes!”4
Where’s the River?’s most memorable show at the Ritz took place on July 31st, 1987 – also known as Black Friday, the day a tornado ripped through parts of Edmonton. “In the interests of ‘the show must go on’, we played to a significant crowd who were determined to try and move beyond the chaos we had all witnessed that day. I recall the band wondering if it was ‘right’ to play music, given the day’s events, but I think a lot of people just wanted to feel a sense of normalcy,” says Winestock, who now lives in Chicago and plays in a classic rock band called Hoopla.
The Ritz also had special events like the annual Skalloween, with customers, staff, and bands dressed in their Halloween finery. The final event at the Ritz was believed to be a Skalloween event in the late ‘90s. Mad Bomber Society was the final band to play the Ritz.5 A well-known ska band in Edmonton, Mad Bomber Society is still going strong today, but had only been around for a couple of years prior to the Ritz’s end.
Carolin Bouchard was there on the Ritz’s last night in 1997. Her son Blair, then 16, was playing saxophone with Mad Bomber Society. “It really looked like the Happy Days restaurant, with red bar stools and checkered floor. It’s so small to have that much live entertainment and just packed [that last night],” she wrote to Leifso in December of 2020.
Bouchard had a friend, Diane Ellerly, who worked as a Ritz server and was also a musician. Ellerly’s band Hell Toupe (pronounced “Hell To Pay”) played at the diner (though not on that final evening).
The Ritz was Segal’s first venture as a restaurateur, and it came with “a very steep learning curve,” he says, as well as a lot of work. After Segal left the Ritz in 1992, it continued to operate as a ’50s diner for a while, before being eventually replaced by Smokey Joe’s Hickory Smokehouse. Smokey Joe’s was a barbecue restaurant originally located in Meadowlark, a community included in Jasper Place prior to amalgamation with Edmonton. And so, a new chapter in the history of this space began.
1Zoom interview between Steve Segal and Paula E. Kirman, June 2022.
2Email interview between Chris Budnarchuk and Brooke Leifso, February 2021.
3Email from Maria Dunn, February 2020.
4Email interview between Howie Winestock and Paula E. Kirman, October 2022.
5Email interview between Rich of Mad Bomber Society and Brooke Leifso, December 2020.
Paula E. Kirman is a freelance writer who grew up, and still lives, near the Jasper Place area.
[This post is an expanded version of an article that appeared in Fall 2022’s SPANN]
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