Toronto eatery keeps Anderson’s mystique alive

Toronto — You can see the stick with which Ilya Kovalchuk scored his 50th goal last season, and the sweater Kari Lehtonen wore while leading Finland to the Bronze Medal at the 2003 World Juniors, and even the engraved names of Vyacheslav Kozlov, Jason Williams and Eric Perrin on the Stanley Cup.

Ondrej Pavelec hoists the Calder Cup in one photo. Todd White casts a glance in another.

All of those Thrashers sights await you at the Hockey Hall of Fame, a few short blocks from the Maple Leafs’ Air Canada Centre home in the heart of this hockey-mad city.

Your Thrashers tour of Toronto won’t be complete, though, until you venture 9-1/2 miles north up Yonge Street, a block past the end of the Yonge-University-Spadina subway line. That’s the home of John Anderson’s Restaurant, the dining establishment named after the Thrashers’ coach.

Come anytime. It’s always open, with breakfast available around the clock. There’s only one hockey reference on the menu, the “Big Puck Burger,” a double hamburger that will set you back $5.75 Canadian.

But that’s not what most customers order when they step to the counter of this tiny place barely big enough to hold two short rows of tables. People come for the souvlaki dinner, a feast of pork or chicken souvlaki with rice, potatoes and Greek salad topped by a thick slice of feta cheese.

Bring an appetite … and a mint.

“Usually the garlic’s so bad you can’t talk to anybody for a week,” Anderson said.

He got into the restaurant business as a Maple Leafs star in the early 1980s and sold his stake when he left the city to play in Quebec, Hartford and a grab bag of minor league cities. His name remains the restaurant’s, and his face remains on the wall.

The faded black-and-white photo is unmistakably him, or rather who he was more than 40 years ago. Stick in hand, captain’s C on his sweater, the boy who would one day lead the Leafs in scoring, coach five minor league champions and stand behind the Thrashers’ bench looks into the camera without a smile or a scowl, just 100 percent serious and ready to go slap another puck into the net.

Yes, that’s him in the photo, Anderson said. Age? Six, he said, then changed his answer to 4.

“I haven’t been there in awhile,” he explained.

Torontonians keep going, though, to this and other John Anderson’s in various neighborhoods and suburbs, from Victoria Park to Mississauga. The restaurants aren’t iconic landmarks like Atlanta’s Varsity, but they have become tiny threads in the local cultural fabric. When Toronto native David Cronenberg directed the 1986 version of the film “The Fly,” he used a John Anderson’s as a location.

The restaurants keep Anderson’s name alive in his hometown as year by year fewer and fewer remember seeing him play. The immigrant behind the counter might have arrived from India after Anderson scored the last of his 282 NHL goals, but he still knows Anderson was a hockey player. So does much of the clientele, even those without detailed recollections of Anderson’s playing days.

“I was born in ‘71. It’s beyond my time,” Nick Dipoce admitted, but he’s a fan nonetheless.

“I’ve been coming here for nine years,” he said. “The food is awesome.”