Rising from the ashes?
Jan Wicha dropped his two kids off at school at 8 a.m. on Jan. 12, as usual, and drove past Café Chianti en route to his morning coffee. The fire trucks at his restaurant stopped him. Police, too. He noticed smoke puffing out of the 130-year-old Halifax building. A policeman raised his hand, told Wicha he couldn’t come any closer.
By 8:30 a.m., flames were shooting out of the windows. Wicha was getting worried. The fire department struggled with low water pressure and the fire spread closer to Chianti’s basement spot, its home for 21 years.
When fire crews finally got the blaze under control on that snowy Tuesday, 18 apartments were ruined and Café Chianti, the Taj Mahal and Tomasino's Cellar Ristorante were homeless.
Standing on the street with his wife, Helen, Wicha’s mind flitted back to their Christmas holiday in Florida a few weeks before. They had noticed a restaurant for rent across the street from their condo. Maybe it was time to move to warmer weather, they had joked. Now, it seemed like fate.
He told reporters he would reopen Café Chianti, though he was worried he’d lose his 25 staff because he didn’t know how long they’d be out of work. His restaurant had weathered hurricanes and blizzards. It wouldn’t be closed by a fire.
But secretly, Wicha wondered if it was time to move. Again.
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Jan Wicha was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in 1956. His father, also Jan Wicha, was a celebrated violinist. As a boy during the Second World War, his father snuck around the streets of Bratislava for clandestine music lessons. After the war, Czechoslovakia balanced precariously between West and East. Western voices wanted American-style freedoms, while Eastern voices turned to the Soviet Union. After the Prague Spring of liberty, Soviet tanks massed on the border.
The Wichas knew it was time to go. They couldn’t pack and say goodbye or the communists would detain them. Even family couldn’t be told. A grandmother was a high-ranking member of the communist party.
“There was a lot of brainwashing in those days. The state was more important than family,” Wicha remembers. “It was just like a weekend trip, but we knew we weren’t coming back. We couldn’t even tell our friends, because you didn’t know who was knowing who. In those days, it was quite dangerous. You could get shot very easily.”
So the family walked out the front door of their apartment, boarded one of the last trains leaving Czechoslovakia and left for good. Young Jan was excited for the adventure, even as they passed the in-coming Soviet army. The family travelled to Austria and then Yugoslavia, living as refuges with friends for six months before Jan senior was offered a position with an orchestra in Cairo.
The family stayed in Egypt a few months before travelling to Beirut, Germany and Toronto. One more move brought them to Halifax for Jan’s job with the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra. Jan junior and his brothers resumed their schooling.
It was around that time that the Wichas met another Czech exile, Dusan Kadlec. Wicha remembers Kadlec as a young, inspiring artist. Kadlec remembers Wicha as a young rascal.
“We crossed paths,” Wicha says.
Wicha went on to study physics at Dalhousie University with a mind to becoming a doctor, but got hooked on the restaurant business. He opened Café Chianti on South Street in 1989 and hired Kadlec to paint the Pompeii-inspired murals. After the fire, one of the first calls he got was from Kadlec. The artist wanted to know if
his paintings had survived.
Smoking a cigarette and listening to Bach in his Northwest Arm studio today, Kadlec grows quiet when asked about Czechoslovakia. He doesn’t want to talk about the old ways, he says. He wants to focus on the future.
Kadlec says this standing in a cluttered studio surrounded by paintings of the past. His latest work is a stark depiction of the Svyataya Anna, an ill-fated Russian ship that became stuck in ice on a 1912 Arctic expedition. Kadlec has captured the scene when her crew first step into the snowy landscape. He says Anna eventually freed herself and floated as a ghost ship for two years, before the Germans torpedoed her.
When Kadlec first arrived in Halifax, he lucked into a deserted four-storey art studio on Hollis Street. The area was being demolished to make way for Founders Square. Kadlec had a spy in City Hall who told him when another building was about to face the wrecker’s ball. Kadlec would take a canvas, sit outside and paint the old building before it was destroyed.
He didn’t keep in touch with other exiles, with the exception of Jan senior. They called each other maestro, he remembers.
After the January 2010 fire, Kadlec went to Café Chianti with Wicha. The paintings had suffered smoke and water damage, but seemed salvageable. He cut the plaster off the walls and started restoring it. It took him two months. “I fell behind on my other work,” he says.
Wicha and his wife eventually decided to stay in Halifax. Their son and daughter were 13 and 14 and they didn’t want to disrupt their life. “We didn’t want them to be Americans,” Wicha says. His father had chosen Canada over Australia or the U.S. and Wicha now reaffirmed that decision.
He’d been bolstered by the dozens and dozens of phone calls he was still getting from concerned customers wondering when the restaurant would reopen.
Insurance claims slowed restoration work on South Street, so he searched Halifax and Dartmouth for a home for a “Café Chianti of the 21st century.” In the end, he didn’t have to go far. He settled on the former home of Bear Restaurant at 1241 Barrington Street, just around the corner for the old location.
It was a modern building with a massive kitchen and a sparse restaurant. “I saw it had quite a bit of potential, but it was very, very cold,” he says. Wicha spent $500,000 warming it up, bringing much of the comfortable atmosphere that defined the old Chianti to the new one.
A big part of that was Kadlec’s art. “We had the same artwork there for 20 years. People got married in the restaurant, anniversaries – we had a lot of history,” Wicha says.
The painted plaster from the old restaurant was attached to the new walls. A rescued fire place was cleaned up and placed in the back eating area. Kadlec was commissioned to create new murals, warm vistas of rolling hills and olive groves in Chianti, Italy. It captures some of the emotion of the old restaurant, of the old world.
The new Café Chianti opened quietly in late May. It was a smooth start, as 24 of the 25 staff came back. “One girl moved to Costa Rica, so you can’t blame her for that,” Wicha smiles.
It’s a busy night, one of the first Saturdays in the new spot. Plans for a grand reopening are underway, but for now it’s more of a family reunion. Diners walk in and are greeted warmly by the staff. Wicha offers an older couple a tour of the new place. With his hair combed back, wire-frame glasses and black shirt under an olive jacket, Wicha looks every bit the European intellectual he might have been.
A group of three middle-aged adults and one young man take a table by the window. They order drinks to toast the young man, who has just graduated from university. Glasses clink. Cheers. Wicha watches from the corner. At Café Chianti, the celebrations have just begun.
From the summer 2010 edition of Halifax Magazine