Cheese Inn Closes

The Cheese Inn, 4585 Dunbar Street, closed on Nov. 17, 2024 to the disappointment of many.

Dunbar Loses its Living Room: Cheese Inn Shuts Its Doors

By Carol Volkart

A hole opened in the Dunbar community on Nov. 17 when The Cheese Inn, a British-pub style restaurant, closed its doors for the last time.

It was a Cheers-style place, where just like in the ‘80s-’90s TV sitcom, everybody did know your name. And if you were a regular who hadn’t shown up for a couple of days, Jaylene Wilson, who’s owned it with her husband Phil McNeill since 2018, would give you a call to make sure you were okay.

“It was a family,” said Jaylene in an interview the week after the heartbreaking experience of shutting the restaurant at 4585 Dunbar. “That’s what I’m going to miss the most.”

Word of The Cheese’s closure sent shockwaves through the community.

“The reaction was overwhelming,” said Jaylene, who had worked at the restaurant since 2010. “I’m humbled by it. I didn’t know how much it meant to people.”

She said she cried all weekend after learning on Friday, Nov. 15, that the bailiffs would arrive on Monday, but in the meantime, there were lineups of customers to serve. “We’ve never been so busy,” she said. “They were lined up out the door. We were turning people away.”

The restaurant began as The Cheshire Cheese Inn in 1979, the brainchild of Derek Cassidy, who went on to open similar outlets in Kerrisdale and North Vancouver serving British pub food like Bangers & Mash, Toad in the Hole and Fisherman’s Pie. All have since closed, but when Dunbar’s shut down in late 2017, Jaylene and Phil took it over and  reopened it in January of 2018 with a new name and the same British-food theme.

Newspaper stories about the earlier closures include the same accolades The Cheese is getting now. Customers treasured their memories of growing up with these restaurants, going first with their parents, then as parents themselves, to a warm and welcoming place that offered the same familiar menu and décor, year after year.

Now it’s our turn.

“The depression on Dunbar is palpable with the closing of the most popular, friendly, warm, welcoming, and historic food service – The Cheese on Dunbar,” Bruce Gilmour, past president of the Dunbar Residents’ Association and a frequent Cheese patron said in an email addressed to Mayor Ken Sim. “Aging and senior citizens got out for lunch, socialized, some fresh air, and benefited from the fellowship The Cheese made possible for all ages and abilities.”

Nicholas Swindale said he and his wife went every few weeks to the nearby “warm and welcoming” Cheese. “We would often meet people we knew there – which does not happen so often in this city and it seemed to have a real community focus, also something hard to find these days,” he wrote in an email. He appreciated the British food that reflected his own background, and the fact that it was still on the menu decades after he first went there. “It is always nice when good things stay the same.”

Evelyn Corker apologized to the Wilsons in an email for not coming as often in recent years because she’s in a wheelchair, but said The Cheese has been “a central community place for decades. Your place was such a welcoming place, with a great vibe and good service… it is such a loss to folks of the Dunbar community and many other ones, who loved to come there.”

Other long-time Dunbar residents such as Charles McKee and Larry Moore both said they’d been Cheese patrons for decades. McKee noted that the last time he was there, the patrons included a three-generation family with a baby in a carrier, reminding him of taking his own child there as a baby. And Moore called The Cheese a “haven,” a place he and his fishing buddies would meet every March to plan their trips, then again in May to discuss them.

Ask Jaylene why places like The Cheese mean so much to people, and she’ll say: “People want a place to go where they feel important. Lots of people, lots of seniors, live alone. People are losing a lot. People need this, for health and happiness; it goes on to mental health. It goes on to feeling important and feeling loved.”

Jaylene’s strategy was fun and family.

The Cheese offered live music on Saturdays when possible, Trivia Tuesdays, karaoke, an annual golf tournament, and Christmas and summer customer appreciation events that started off with free beer and wine. “I probably donated more than I should have – that’s why I don’t have a business now,” she said wryly.

A mother of five herself, promoting a family atmosphere at The Cheese came naturally to Jaylene, helped by the fact that her own kids – now aged 19 to 35 – sometimes worked there. She watched the customers’ kids grow up and they watched hers. For seniors whose own children were gone, “this was their community, their place of feeling like they belonged to a family.”

Key to the family feeling were the regulars, who helped when Jaylene and Phil first took over the restaurant and supported them “to the bitter end,” she said. One offered financial help to get them started, and others offered sleeves-rolled-up help with cleaning, fixing sound systems and even bartending when needed. Regulars propped up the restaurant during Covid, lingering a bit when they came in to pick up their takeout. And regulars created a video, now treasured by Jaylene, comparing The Cheese to the Cheers pub, complete with the “it’s where everybody knows your name” theme song.

“It was a family,” said Jaylene. “From the very beginning the community came together and gave me their blessing.”

As for why the restaurant closed, Jaylene was forthright about falling behind on rent. But this had happened before, she said, and she’d always been able to make catch-up arrangements. “But this time it was a hard no.” She speculated that might be due to current plans to rezone most of the block for an apartment building. The Cheese would be gone, but the plans include a new Dunbar Theatre and two new restaurants on the ground floor.

There were other reasons. The restaurant business has gone down by about 30 percent, she said, and restaurateurs are struggling with rising food costs and rents. She said she had to make $12,000 a month to keep the doors open, and business has been noticeably worse since Covid.

As Jaylene and her husband recover from the shock of the sudden closure, they’re looking at options. One is starting Birdy’s Nest home-cooked meals, which would see them cook and deliver the kind of meals they once served up at The Cheese. “We love to cook and we’re good at it,” Jaylene said.

But she’ll miss The Cheese. And whatever new restaurants open when the 4500 block is finally redeveloped, she strongly suspects they won’t be about hosting generations of Dunbar families, checking on regulars if they don’t show up, or bringing seniors a taste of home.