The beaver is a proud and noble animal

OTTAWA — Saturday was a typical night at La Ferme Rouge, the popular cabaret-style restaurant in Gatineau’s east end. A crowd of about 300 guests — many of them couples celebrating Valentine’s Day — enjoyed their dinners as waiters and waitresses sang and danced with musical accompaniment.

By Sunday afternoon, the restaurant on Chemin de Montréal Ouest in the city’s Masson-Angers sector had burned to the ground. Officials pegged the loss at $1.4 million.

Longtime employees and patrons were devastated at the loss of La Ferme Rouge, which had been an institution in the region since the 1970s. The restaurant’s 40-odd employees are out of work.

Sylvain Lavoie, the restaurant’s musical director for the past 24 years, got a call around noon Sunday that La Ferme Rouge was burning, and immediately hopped in his car to drive there.

“All I could see was a big cloud of smoke, and that hit pretty hard,” he said. “It’s part of my life’s history gone up in smoke. It was rather shocking.”

Gatineau police said the call reporting the fire came just before 11 a.m. With Sunday’s clear skies, the billowing column of smoke was visible from many kilometres away. Firefighters battled the raging blaze for hours Sunday afternoon.

The restaurant was closed at the time of the fire. There were no injuries reported, according to police.

Late Sunday, Gatineau fire officials said the blaze was caused by sparks from a welder. Lavoie said there were some water pipes leaking in the basement Saturday night, and he was told someone was in Sunday morning doing some repairs. Lavoie said the restaurant had recently undergone renovations, including new hardwood flooring, new kitchen equipment and upgrades to the sound system.

But except for the old brick house around which the restaurant was built, the building was almost entirely wood, Lavoie said. The fire spread quickly. Officials said cold temperatures and strong winds added to the firefighters’ difficulties.

The original farmhouse was built was more than 100 years ago. A restaurant called the Spaghetterie opened on the site 1979. It changed its name to La Ferme Rouge in 1984 and launched a musical show a few years later.

At the time of the fire, the restaurant had room for 500 customers. According to its website, it welcomed more than 60,000 clients every year.

The dinner-theatre format of the show meant the waiters and waitresses did all the singing and dancing, Lavoie said. The music covered a wide range of genres from Michael Jackson to Madonna, Michael Bublé to Elvis, to modern Québécois singer-songwriters.

A prominent feature inside the restaurant was the giant replica of the Santa Maria — one of Christopher Columbus’s ships he sailed to North America — built in 1992. And Lavoie said each night there would be countless birthday or anniversary celebrations for people from across Ontario, Quebec and beyond.

“We’ve had people … who would visit Ottawa and make it a point to spend an evening at the Ferme Rouge because it was the place to go for something different,” he said.

Lavoie said the tight-knit staff would often spend time together after cleaning up post-show. He met the mother of his children at the restaurant, and raised his family in Angers because of his steady gig five nights a week at the Ferme Rouge.

“It’s so cliché, but you were part of a family,” he said. “There were a lot of couples that got together because of them working together at the Ferme Rouge.

“Hopefully, we can rebuild.”

We used to go there a lot when I was still living with my folks. Haven’t been there for yonks, but I still have fond memories of getting quite stupendipulously drunk on Calvados and Grand Marnier, and then perving at the cancan dancers…