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In that decade, Vancouver had a few joints similar to Nick’s, including the storied Iaci’s on Seymour Street, Pattison said, but nowadays, “there’s no place like it.”

Indeed, for quite a while now, there’s been no place like Nick’s.

The food and the feel of the Italian eatery has hardly changed in the last half-century. It’s one of the last vestiges of a bygone era of Vancouver, when the city was half the size and of limited global significance. When Nick’s serves its final meatball later this month, it will be gone forever.

Photo by Arlen Redekop / PNG

In 1955, Nick Felicella opened a tiny coffee shop at 631 Commercial Drive that he soon expanded into his eponymous pasta restaurant.

In the time since then, “Vancouver has changed enormously,” says Pattison, a man who knows a thing or two about the city’s transformation, and who used to grab late-night meals at Nick’s while he worked long hours running Expo 86.

But inside Nick’s, time stood still.

Other long-running Vancouver institutions — the Hotel Vancouver or the Cambie Pub are two well-known, if disparate, examples — have adapted over the decades with changes in everything from technology to tastes.

There’s nothing wrong with those businesses modernizing, of course, but at Nick’s, everything is old school. And that’s deliberate.

Over the years, many customers told Felicella never to redecorate. They wanted the room to stay just as it was, or they threatened they “would never come back no more,” Felicella recalled this week seated at one of the iconic red-and-white checkered tabletops.