McIROY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-01-03 published
The King of Danforth-Woodbine
Butcher knew customers' names, gave jobs to kids
Realtors touted shop as a plus in neighbourhood
By Catherine
DUNPHY,
Obituary
Writer
For one week last November, the neighbourhood around Danforth
and Woodbine Aves. was dipped in gloom.
Many people stood on the sidewalk outside Royal Beef -- a neighbourhood
mecca since 1992 -- waiting for the passage of the funeral cortege
from nearby St. Brigid's Church. Close to 2,000 more had gone
to the church to say goodbye.
Paul ESTRELA, 46, their butcher and their buddy, had died.
They were both
ESTRELA's customers and his Friends -- there was
never any differentiating. A big, handsome guy with a boom box
of a voice, he'd hail them by name from behind the counter at
the back of his butcher shop.
"No lawyers today. We're not serving lawyers,"
ESTRELA would
holler at Jay
JOSEFO, a regular Saturday morning customer and
a lawyer. There he'd be, grinning, framed by the stuffed animal
heads on the wall behind him -- all mementoes from mentors, he'd
say, insisting he never picked up a gun himself.
Once ESTRELA demanded to see a note from
JOSEFO's wife before
selling him rib steaks cut as thick as
JOSEFO wanted. And so
JOSEFO's wife
Wendy wrote
ESTRELA a note: "Dear Paul: Jay has
my permission to have Jay-sized steaks."
"He had fun and you had such fun going there,"
JOSEFO said, recalling
ESTRELA.
Customers came from all over the city to the shop
ESTRELA ran
with his wife Carmen. Others came every week from Collingwood,
while some trekked to Toronto once a year from Buffalo. Most
Saturdays, Royal Beef seemed like a crowded and very lively social
club, with customers greeting each other in between kibitzing
with Paul and catching up with Carmen.
Local real-estate agents often talked up Royal Beef as a great
reason to buy a house in the area.
ESTRELA was hailed in Toronto
Life magazine, as well as in this newspaper, as a treasure --
one of the city's best butchers, an old-fashioned, savvy professional.
He refused to sell meat that hadn't been aged 30 days, and once
told a reporter he could cut meat four different ways: Italian,
Canadian, German and English.
ESTRELA named his store after the Royal Winter Fair, where he
won a butcher contest in 1982.
"He will be so missed," said Lucie
JOHNSON, who first came into
the store with her kids in strollers. "My kids are Royal Beef
babies. That's what all his customers called our kids. Once you
came here, you couldn't buy meat at a supermarket."
ESTRELA made a point of giving jobs to kids from the neighbourhood.
"They would come here from school and tell Paul they wanted to
work here, always because of Paul," said Carmen, who runs the
shop's deli section.
For six years, Duncan
McIROY and his brother walked by the store
on their way to school. "Paul would be opening up and he'd toss
me an orange," he recalled.
McIROY started going into the store
for sandwiches -- "I wasn't a big fan of the ones my mom made
and it was $2 for the best sandwich you've ever seen" -- and
they started talking.
One Halloween,
ESTRELA pointed to a huge pumpkin at the front
of the store and told
McIROY he'd give him a job if he could
figure out a way to take it home.
McIROY ran home, grabbed his
brother and a wagon, and the pair heaved and hauled it up and
took it away.
ESTRELA kept his part of the deal, hiring the 13-year-old
McIROY six months later.
"My main job was to clean up, fetch him his cappuccinos and let
him yell at me,"
McIROY, now 21, said about the man he calls
his best friend. "If he had been as big as his voice, he'd be
8 feet tall."
ESTRELA was also 13 when he started working at the meat counter
of Darrigos, a now-defunct Italian chain of supermarkets. He
had just moved to Canada from Portugal with his parents and six
sisters, and he learned not only to slaughter and skin animals
but to speak Italian. That came in handy when he began courting
a 16-year-old Carmen, whose Italian mother was a customer at
the store. They married when she was 17 and he 19.
"My parents still held hands," said their daughter Bridgette,
22. She worked with her father in the shop on Sundays -- retail
down time they spent talking and just "hanging out," she said.
The ESTRELAs also have a son John, 26.
ESTRELA spent 11 years as a butcher at a Dominion grocery store
until he opened his own place on Valentine's Day in 1984, on
Woodmount Ave., around the corner from where Royal Beef was eventually
established.
"There wasn't anyone who thought he would make it there, but
Paul had the determination of a young bull, a warrior," said
Gord DOUCETTE, a friend and fellow butcher. Until
ESTRELA opened
his own store, the two used to fish every Sunday morning on the
Duffins Creek in Pickering, then grab bacon and eggs at Ted's
Restaurant on Old Kingston Rd.
After ESTRELA opened his own place,
DOUCETTE would come by every
Monday morning for coffee and some shop talk.
ESTRELA used to
say DOUCETTE was the older brother he never had.
A year ago,
ESTRELA was featured in the Star extolling the virtues
of a new cut of steak, the tri-tip. "It's going to take off once
people find out about it," he predicted at the time. As usual,
he was right.
A month later,
ESTRELA was diagnosed with cancer. He took three
days off work, and startled customers wondered where he was.
When word got out, offers of help poured in.
"People were saying, 'Anything you need, drives to hospital,
anything,'" Bridgette said.
When ESTRELA told
DOUCETTE, his friend promised to keep the business
going. He closed down his own business and now runs the Royal
Beef meat counter.
A little more than a week after
ESTRELA's
November 7 death, the
lights came back on at Royal Beef.
"I couldn't stay away," Carmen said. "All my customers, we just
needed to come together."
M... Names Mc... Names McI... Names McIR... Names Welcome Home
MCIROY - All Categories in OGSPI