Since its doors first opened in 1924, a small diner at the corner of Union and Division had been a favorite of Queen’s students and faculty.
Its initial name, the Queen’s Restaurant, was confusing, with many assuming it was the university’s official eatery, so it eventually took the name the Tea Room, or the Queen’s Tea Room.
At first, the Tea Room offered boarding house-style beds and dining, but by the 1940s it became a corner restaurant replete with a lunch counter, pivoting stools, and leatherette booths. A succession of Greek-Canadians – George Sakell and then James and George Zekios – managed the place, becoming familiar faces to all at Queen’s.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Tea Room served as Queen’s de facto faculty club. Professors drifted over to the restaurant throughout the day for a coffee, a sandwich and a generous serving of gossip. Cigarette smoke swirled.
In the late 1960s, habits began to change. With the faculty growing in size, Principal Deutsch decided that the time had come for a proper faculty club, one that would attach the professors to their campus. In 1969, a remodeled 1840s home overlooking the lake on King Street opened and was soon providing professors with lunch, billiards and a sense of camaraderie.
Meanwhile on Union Street, the Tea Room’s existence was threatened. The university’s huge growth in the 1960s put pressure on campus geography. New classrooms and residence beds were desperately needed. Anxious to build a new home for its Department of Mining Engineering, Queen’s bought old houses along Union Street. In 1971-72, the land was used to erect Goodwin Hall.
Although encircled by Queen’s, the Tea Room held out until 1973 when the Zekios brothers finally sold out and the bulldozers arrived. An outpouring of nostalgia from Queen’s alumni marked the loss.
In 2006, the Tea Room rose again. In the spirit of Queen’s student initiative, a group of engineering students, led by Michele Romanow, Sc’07, hatched a plan to wedge a café into the street corner floor of the new Beamish-Munro Hall, Queen’s Integrated Learning Centre. The new Tea Room would be student-owned and operated. It dedicated itself to a creed of environmental responsibility, educating its patrons about the planet they lived on and making sure that it paid its own way.
The new Tea Room has flourished, and environmental consciousness has been central to its mission. All its packaging is biodegradable. Its vericomposters – worms munching their way through organic waste – provide soil for the Tea Room’s plant life. The coffee, food and carbon footprint are probably better than that of its ancestor; the gossip probably about the same.
