Weston wonder As it turns 79 and expands into FreshCo locations across city, Cantor's Quality Meats and Groceries is still pounding out the protein By: David Sanderson  Posted: 3:00 AM CST Sunday, Mar. 7, 2021 Last Modified: 9:43 AM CST Sunday, Mar. 7, 2021 Updates

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This article was published 07/03/2021 (1669 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s Monday morning at FreshCo on Regent Avenue, one of three stores, a number that will soon double to six, that the Ontario-based, discount grocer has established in Winnipeg since May 2019.

We’re waiting our turn to get some luncheon meat when we notice a fellow ahead of us in line pointing toward a red-and-white sign reading “Cantor’s Express” affixed to a refrigerated display unit loaded to the hilt with steaks, ribs, pork chops and assorted cold cuts.

“Cantor’s?” he remarks to a masked employee reaching down for a chub of salami. “Is that something new?”

Er, not exactly.

“It’s funny because we get that same question here, too, mainly from people who’ve recently moved to the area and are more familiar with Sobeys or Superstore,” says Ed Cantor, 58, owner of Cantor’s Quality Meats and Groceries, 1445 Logan Ave.

Later this month, even more Winnipeggers will become familiar with the Cantor’s brand when a new FreshCo opens in Niakwa Village, near Fermor Avenue. The store, which will replace a Safeway formerly situated at the site, will come equipped with a satellite Cantor’s deli, as well as a fully stocked Cantor’s Express butcher counter, a feature at the Regent Avenue FreshCo and one at 920 Jefferson Ave.

Sure, we could have left it to Cantor’s staff at each of those locales to, upon request, offer shoppers the Coles Notes version of the story: how Cantor’s grandfather, Edward Cantor, founded his namesake biz close to 80 years ago in the heart of the North End, and how Cantor began working for his father Joe and uncle Oscar more than 40 years ago at the age of 14, and has never left. But then we figured, hey, why not tell the tale here, perhaps saving ourselves a few minutes in line the next time we’re grabbing a pound of pastrami (shaved, not sliced, please and thanks) and the person in front of us openly wonders, “Hmm, what’s Cantor’s?”

• • •

Edward Cantor was in his mid-30s when he, his wife Sara and their four young children, two sets of twins, moved to Winnipeg from Tuczna, a village in eastern Poland near the Belarus border, in 1928. They didn’t know a soul here, his grandson says. Rather, the way he understands it, his grandparents were simply looking for a better life, one that offered new opportunities. After doing their homework they became convinced Canada was the answer to their dreams.

The family settled in the North End where the elder Cantor immediately got busy doing anything and everything he could to make ends meet. For a long spell he peddled buttons, zippers and thread to farmers living just outside the city, people who sewed their own clothes. Those relationships continued after he opened the first rendition of Cantor’s at the foot of what is now the Slaw Rebchuk Bridge. On a routine basis he would trade whatever was lining his shelves for a couple of chickens or a side of beef, which he would choose to bring home for dinner or turn around and sell to the next person who ventured through his front door.

Edward Cantor was only 51 when he died in 1944. There was little time to mourn. Sara took over the store and commissioned her two youngest children, Joe and his twin brother Oscar, to lend her a hand.

“Dad (Joe) had just come back from the (Second World) war — he got drafted when he was 18 and was a decoder on a ship — when his father passed away,” Cantor says, noting his uncle Oscar would have willingly served as well if it hadn’t been for a heart murmur detected during the sign-up phase. “After my grandfather died, the family moved to a two-storey house on Gallagher (Avenue), almost directly behind where our store is now. They lived upstairs, and ran the grocery store on the main level, which in the beginning couldn’t have had more than 1,000 square feet, if that.”

Cantor chuckles, citing a series of newspaper articles from just under a year ago that lauded large grocery chains for offering home delivery service to customers, owing to the outbreak of the coronavirus. Heck, he says, his father and uncle (their two older siblings were never involved in the family biz) began providing that service in the late 1940s, and never stopped.

“My dad used to talk about an old bicycle he had with a basket on the front, and a wagon attached to the back,” he says. “He had to be careful if he was delivering something like eggs because back then there were streetcar tracks all along Logan (Avenue) and if he wasn’t watching where he was going, his front tire would get stuck and he’d dump everything.”

As we mentioned earlier, Cantor started working for his father and uncle, who eventually took over from their mother, when he was in junior high. By then the store, still on Gallagher, had expanded to 3,700 square feet. After graduating from Garden City Collegiate, he enrolled in Red River College’s business administration program. The problem was, he didn’t feel he was learning anything in class he didn’t already know from working side-by-side with his father and uncle. His dad wasn’t disappointed when he announced he wouldn’t be returning for his second year of studies, far from it.

“He and my uncle had come to depend on me. Whenever I took a day off, it was always, ‘Where’s Edward?’ I grew up in the business, through good times and bad,” he said. “The interesting thing about working with family is you can blow up at each other when something goes wrong, but at the end of the day, when you’re all sitting down at the dinner table, it’s never discussed. It’s all good.”

(Here’s something they don’t teach you at business school: Joe Cantor could never say no to a paying customer, even if they arrived just as the store was due to close. He’d tell his cashiers to head home for the night, and that he’d handle the transaction. Only instead of sticking around to cash out, he’d simply tuck the day’s receipts into a plastic bag and walk home with thousands of dollars on his person, bringing everything back first thing the next morning.)

Joe Cantor died in May 2013, four years after Cantor’s Quality Meats and Groceries relocated to its current digs, four times the size of its predecessor. Following the $2-million move, the old store was razed to make way for what is currently Cantor’s parking lot. Describing his dad, who worked a full, eight-hour shift before suffering a heart attack at the wheel of his car on the way home, as a (poop) disturber, Cantor recalls how people still bring up the battle he fought in the 1980s, when he successfully took on the provincial government after he was charged with selling milk for less than was allowed by law. That was, if he even billed some of his more down-on-their-luck customers at all.

In a letter to the Free Press following his death, businessman and former mayoral candidate Peter Kaufmann wrote, “Joe was a generous man, and many of his customers that were short a few dollars to buy food will attest to that. He never really worried if he would get paid back, he said he got paid back in many ways.” Further proving that point, in the “condolences and memories” section of his online obituary a person noted, “My family lived on Gallagher Avenue directly across from Cantor’s and it was an important part of our lives. When my dad died, Joe and Oscar kept on sending my mother her Friday grocery order until she was on her feet again.”

“It was interesting because after he passed away, lots of people dropped by the store, not necessarily to shop but just to let me know how much they respected my dad, and to share a story or two I hadn’t heard before,” Cantor says. “One person told me how Dad used to drive her home with her bags of groceries whenever she was short bus fare. We still get people coming in who say the place isn’t the same without him out front, saying hello to everybody and asking about their kids or grandkids.”

His uncle, Oscar, whose specialty was managing the meat department, was the quiet one of the pair, Cantor says.

The association with FreshCo was that company’s idea, not his, he says. Management wanted to involve a third party to run the meat department in their Manitoba stores and because Cantor’s is a local institution, they approached him to see if he was game. Thus far, it’s been a win-win, he says.

“For a long time, our regular shoppers who no longer live in the neighbourhood had been bugging us to open a store in their end of town. Our meat department is probably what we’re most famous for so they’re pleased they can get their Cantor’s house-made bacon, sausage or corned beef without having to drive across town.”

While he can’t say for sure, Cantor has a pretty good idea how his dad, who was never shy about reaching out and embracing those he considered friends more than customers, would have reacted to the current environment which encourages people to stay two metres apart to help stem the spread of COVID-19.

First of all, he would have been aghast at making even one person line up outside when the store reached capacity, his son says. “He would have looked at me and yelled, ‘What are you doing? We’re losing business. Let ’em all in!’” Cantor says with a laugh. Secondly, he can’t imagine his father being much for wearing a mask day in, day out.

“I can hear him now. ‘What do I need that thing for?’ is probably what he would have said,” he continues, adding the only “holiday” his father ever took during close to 70 years on the job, pretty much, was when he was in the hospital, recovering from minor surgery. One winter his father and mother went to Hawaii for what was supposed to be a two-week vacation, only to hop on a return flight four days later, his father complaining, “There’s nothing to do here except sit on a beach all day. Tell me what’s so great about that?”

As for his own plans, Cantor, a married father of two grown children — their daughter is a lawyer and their son is completing his final year of medical school in Ireland — says he doesn’t intend to work into his late 80s like his father and uncle did, but there is one date he has circled on the calendar.

“I’d love to stick around until the store turns 100, which is 22 years down the road,” he says. “That would be quite the achievement I think, something that would definitely put a smile on the face of my dad and uncle, wherever they are.”

David Sanderson writes about Winnipeg-centric restaurants and businesses.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca