by Stephen Vogler

How does one create Vancouver’s most loved organic café, a place so infused with casual farm ambience and warm humanity it feels as though an arm has stretched in from the fertile Fraser Valley and offered up a handful of produce still tingling with bucolic energy. For Allan Christian, founder of Aphrodite’s Organic Café & Pie Shop on West Fourth Avenue, the link from farm to city was part of the natural arc of his life, the culmination of an adventurous journey which sadly came to an end on April 29th, 2008.

Allan grew up on a family farm in southeast Saskatchewan with three younger sisters and a host of cousins near the small town of Rocanville. The one-room Prosperity School house was down a long country road, the New Finland Church that served the Finnish community on his mother’s side, down another. Allan’s boyhood on the expansive prairie fields gave way to jerry-rigged motorcycles, Jitterbug dances and big cars. It was one such 1965 Meteor that took him and his new bride, Gaylene Howie from the nearby town of Tantallon, first east to Port Arthur, then west to the coast.

With dairy cows and wheat fields firmly in his past, Allan worked his way from a bank to an insurance company as he and Gaylene raised their daughter Peggy and son Derrick in North Vancouver. By the time I met Allan (my future father-in-law), he was in his mid-forties with two grown children, a successful insurance business, a house in North Van and condo in Whistler, a 31 foot mahogany Chris-Craft named Yolana, and plenty of time for extended martini lunches with friends and associates.

But it wasn’t long before Allan’s high-rolling life came crashing down. A couple of bad business deals during the volatile eighties market along with failing health due to excessive eating and drinking caused him to reach a life-changing realization: leave this life-style behind or there might be no tomorrow. After losing it all, including his 27 year marriage, Allan quit drinking cold-turkey and forged ahead in search of something else.

He rented a dingy basement suite in Vancouver, bought over-ripe produce from under the counter at Granville Market, and occasionally picked fruit in Richmond to make a few bucks. On one such occasion his beater car ran out of gas and he had to gather empty cans to get enough gas money for the return trip. Far from being daunted by this state of affairs, he seemed to embrace the new sense of adventure in his life, and in his own quiet way I think he enjoyed thumbing his nose at the lifestyle he’d left behind.

Allan was always brilliant at building new businesses out of nothing. Not long after the pop can episode, he began searching for lost gold on sunken Spanish galleons. The venture grew into a small corporation with half a million dollars in investment. While gold was located on some of the galleons and arrangements were made with various governments to retrieve it, it didn’t matter in the end that the gold was never brought to the surface; Allan had lost interest by this time, and his searching took him in new directions.

While living with his new partner, artist Ursula Medley (who’d been painting murals of Spanish galleons when they met), Allan started a house painting company. I don’t know how much painting experience he had, but it didn’t matter; he had a good understanding of human nature. He knew that the well-heeled folks of West Vancouver wanted the best painting job money could buy, so he charged a premium and was never wanting for customers. The painting business served him well for some years, but Allan soon moved on to marketing for Hollyhock on Cortez Island. Here was the centre of the universe for people searching for meaning in life, and Allan met a new large circle of interesting and esoteric friends.

While still involved with Hollyhock, Allan helped the Glen Valley Organic Farm Cooperative draw more shareholders and he eventually moved to the farm. Now he found something he could really sink his teeth into: a return to the rich soils and peaceful rhythms of his childhood. With three new grandchildren, Jonathan, Melissa and Katie on the scene, Grandpa Al encouraged a no-holds-barred adventure on the farm. Collecting eggs from the chickens, trying to ride ornery miniature horses and watching Grandpa Al and Farmer John turn loose a huge bullfrog in the living room were all part of a typical farm visit.

On one such visit, Allan’s mother Lila came out from Saskatchewan to see her son back on the farm. Allan had been baking pies from apples that had fallen from the trees, and with four generations in the house, Lila imparted some of her famous prairie-tested recipes and baking techniques. It was only a few weeks later that Allan announced he’d rented a storefront on West Fourth Avenue and was opening a pie shop. Aphrodite’s rose from the seas of a somewhat ramshackle space into the warm and inviting natural extension of the farm that it is today.

From the moment Aphrodite’s opened, I knew Allan had found, or rather created, that sense of meaning he’d been searching for. You could see it in his warm smile when offering up one of his pies, in the extended hugs he liberally offered to his many friends who began to frequent the place, in the family-like atmosphere of the staff, and in the way Aphrodite’s had become a natural extension of himself.

If the arc of a life can draw a full circle, Allan followed it all the way around to the beginning––he reached back to his farm roots, and from that rich soil offered a bounty for all in the city to enjoy. His spirit lives on at Aphrodite’s, where his daughter Peggy and son Derrick will continue the tradition he began.

Editor note: The following poem was Allan’s final homage. Chalked on the daily menu board at Aphrodite’s restaurant, it is wisdom to live by ... be the love you want to see in the world.

If God
Invited you to a party
And said

“Everyone
In the ballroom tonight
Will be my special
Guest,”

How would you them treat them
When you
Arrived?

Indeed, indeed!

And Hafiz knows
There is no one in this world

Who
Is not upon
His Jeweled Dance
Floor.

- HAFIZ -