To understand
Bamm’s Snack Shack
— a small, colourful restaurant on Cobourg Street in
Lowertown
— you have to understand the back room.
A couple of Victorian couches immediately command the eye, although they compete with the two video games set to free play, a TV screen with Wii controllers, a table and chairs, bins of Lego and toy cars, crafts, board games, books, a poster of the solar system and a portrait of Homer Simpson.
It is at once an eccentric rec room, a kids playhouse and an after-school hub.
For
a restaurant
that lacks a walk-in fridge, freezer or dry storage, the back room is hardly the most efficient use of space. It certainly doesn’t maximize revenue.
But that’s the point. Bamm’s is not a restaurant set up for maximum table turnover. Instead, it’s designed with the community in mind. Owners Ashley and Matt Atton, who live nearby, opened Bamm’s after noticing how isolated the neighbourhood had become during the pandemic.
And it’s been so successful at that mission that the couple will close its doors for good on May 1 after a three-year run of exhausting success.
Bamm’s is not closing due to a lack of loyalty. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s so popular that, frankly, Ashley and Matt don’t have the stamina to keep up anymore.
This isn’t simply another business closing. It’s a real community loss.
Since making the announcement last month, the Attons have faced a steady stream of customers saddened to learn of the fate of what many consider their community centre.
“Did I not come in enough? Did I not buy enough?” neighbour Susanne Ure asked almost apologetically on a recent Friday morning, as if the restaurant’s closure was somehow the result of insufficient loyalty.
“There’s very few community hubs of this nature left in neighbourhoods anymore,” she said. “It’s cosy and warm, and, when we’re here, I actually see people I know — my neighbours — coming in.
“People have developed routines around it. We come every Friday
to get donuts.
”
Another customer, Mary Rook, showed me a photo of herself and six other seniors gathered around a table at Bamm’s after a swim at Patro d’Ottawa pool next door.
“We don’t want to go anywhere else, do we?” she asked her 12-year-old grandson, Khalid Muhamud.
Apparently not. Khalid said he’s hoping to hold his birthday party there this month.
If he does, it would be one in a long string of events hosted at Bamm’s: poetry readings, yoga mornings, flower-arranging workshops and community meetings to name a few.
And there have been the more service-oriented ones, like the 250 turkey meals that Ashley and Matt, the latter a Red Seal chef, prepare for the Lowertown Community Resource Centre’s festive dinner each December, along with toy drives organized out of Bamm’s back room.
On the wall behind the lunch counter, meanwhile, is the Pay-It-Forward board, where customers quietly pay for meals for those who can’t afford them.
The sense of family is even found in the restaurant’s name, an acronym — after a fashion — of Ashley and Matt’s first names, along with those of their three boys, Bowie, Brady and Myles.
The irony of customers wondering whether they hadn’t done enough is not lost on Ashley, who says she is “heartbroken” by the prospect of this grassroots gathering place disappearing.
“It’s a community space that offers food,” she said — not the other way around.
When she and Matt announced the closure, “the worst part,” she said, was having to face disappointed regulars.
“They’re so sad, but they completely understand why. We’re all grieving together.”
On a school day, between 30 and 50 students — many from nearby De La Salle high school — can pass through in just 45 minutes. Dinner brings 60 to 90 dishes from a kitchen that fits three staff comfortably — or four rubbing elbows. The business comes in waves — flood, lull, flood again — making staffing and prep a constant scramble.
And, with almost nowhere to store food, supplies must be bought in small, frequent runs. The obvious fix would be to sacrifice the back room, turn it into a walk-in fridge and maximize efficiency.
Ashley, who describes her personality as “all or nothing,” says that’s not going to happen.
“In my brain, it’s 100 per cent not an option to give up that back space.”
Because if you get rid of the couches and arcade games, take down the solar system poster and pack up the Lego bins, Bamm’s loses much of the reason people go there in the first place.
Ashley said she and Matt need to step back and recalibrate. The pace has simply become unsustainable. Matt plans on going back to school to become a culinary instructor. Ashley isn’t sure of what she’ll do, but is leaving the door open for pop-up opportunities, perhaps donut production in a different space or a collaboration with another restaurant.
Meanwhile, the Bamm’s brand is built and the community goodwill is real. The couple would welcome someone willing to carry the idea forward.
Otherwise, Lowertown won’t just lose a place to get burgers, fries, donuts and mac and cheese. It will lose its back room.
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