The contrast with today’s menu is striking. Over 200 items, including steak, chicken, shrimp, many pasta dishes and, yes, salads and desserts, are all served in the busy, sporty BP atmosphere. But you can still get a pizza with crust made from Agioritis’s original recipe.
Even the “Royal,” while still on the menu, has been altered. The original recipe called for pizza sauce, pepperoni, bacon, shrimp, olives, green pepper, onion, mushrooms, anchovies and mozzarella. The anchovies were removed and the bacon was swapped for smoked ham.
BP is now far removed from Edmonton, with its head office located in Richmond, B.C. Treliving, who is also famous for his part in the reality show, Dragons’ Den, lives in Dallas.
So has the casual cuisine behemoth forgotten its Edmonton roots? “We push it as much as we can, but in the U.S. people don’t know where Edmonton is, especially the further south you go.”
BP offers a company history on its website, which highlights its start in Edmonton.
Earls
Anybody who has lived in Edmonton since the ’80s remembers those places with the parrots hanging from their ceilings. They were the original Earls, opened by Leroy Earl “Bus” Fuller and his son, Stanley Earl Fuller, on Calgary Trail and on Jasper Avenue. Restaurants had been in the family for 25 years with Fuller’s, a Denny’s type of chain, but they wanted to appeal to a younger, hipper crowd. In the ’70s, there were 25 Fuller’s locations across Western Canada.
It was 1982: the boom was over and prime interest rates hovered at around 17 per cent. Hard times seemed easier with $1.25 beer and bacon burgers for less than $5, says Stan Fuller. “We sort of realized that we hit a sweet spot with low pricing. The Keg had inexpensive steak and drinks, but this was in the $5-to-$10 range, so you could have a night out without being out of pocket.”
The original restaurants were small and noisy, filled with patio furniture, people with big hair and yes, papier-maché parrots. As time went on, new items such as pasta were brought into the menu, and eventually Earls’ offerings became more upscale, with a variety of entrees from salmon to steak, and “entree salads for the ladies,” Fuller says.