History
The restaurant is owned and operated by John Letnik who came to Canada as a refugee from Yugoslavia in 1957. He opened the restaurant aboard the MS Normac in 1970. The Normac had served several years with the Detroit Fire Department and then as a ferry that travelled between Tobermory and Manitoulin Island. In 1975 Letnik bought the larger Jadran from the Yugoslav government. The Jadran was one of three luxury cruise ships built in Split for the Jadranska Linijska Plovidba company. For several years it operated as a luxury cruise ship in the Adriatic and Aegean. Letnik purchased the ship in 1975 for a million dollars, and it became a second location for his restaurant. As well as being its owner, Letnick also serves as chef.
The ship is one of many attractions in the area known as Harbourfront.
In 1981 the Normac was struck by then Metro Toronto Parks-operated ferry Trillium and sunk. No one was hurt, but the restaurant was destroyed. This set off a long legal battle between Letnik and the city. Letnik was eventually awarded damages, but reportedly not enough to compensate for the destruction. The Normac was raised and refurbished and served as a floating restaurant in other communities with the Jadran being the sole home of Captain John's since then.
While in the 1970s and 1980s, the floating restaurant was a desired culinary destination attracting prominent diners such as Brian Mulroney, Mel Lastman, Robert Campeau and Steve Stavro, it lost favour as the city's gastronomical scene became more sophisticated and diverse. More recent reviews from local papers rated its culinary fare as average, despite the restaurant's boasts of having "the best seafood in town!" Reviews by patrons are decidedly mixed. The restaurant's clientele is primarily tourists and many bus tours stop at Captain John's.
Read more about this topic: Captain John's Harbour Boat Restaurant
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)