Burnt Tongue is famous for soup.

But at the restaurant's flagship location on Cannon near James, something else has patrons talking.

It's a piece of vintage art. Hamilton, every inch.

It's an illustrated map that hangs by the takeout area, and Leo Tsangarakis will tell us how it came to be there.

On Friday, the 13th day of September 2013, he and executive chef Dan Robinson opened the original Burnt Tongue. (Now there's one on Locke South too.)

Awhile after the opening, Leo's girlfriend Haley Snow said her grandparents had a gift for him. Vernon and Judy Fletcher were cleaning out Sunny-Lea, their Binbrook-area century farm. There in the basement was the map. They knew how much Leo cared about Hamilton.

Leo put it up.

"People adore that poster," he says.

Sometimes they're upset when the bag of food arrives before they're done exploring it. They pull out phones and tweet the map, or put it on Instagram.

Many admirers are young, maybe not born when that poster came out in 1985.

That same year, Leo was born in Athens. He's been here since age three.

"Hamilton is a hard-working city," he says. "I love it."

In tiny print at the bottom of the map, it says "Published by 623206 Ontario Inc. Copies of this and 100 other cities: Box 246 Grimsby, Ont."

Down there too is the name of the artist: Montreal's Jean-Louis Rheault. Check out Facebook, where he describes himself today as "flawed, mortal and perplexed" and says he's been doing illustrated maps since 1979.

Each business would have paid to be on that poster, and would have received a stack of them to hand out.

Time now for the magnifying glass. Still with us are places like Denninger's, Milli, Beasley's. Some just changed names, like Henderson Hospital, Holiday Inn, Hanrahan's.

But many are gone, like Patterson Furniture, L'Escargot, Procter & Gamble, American Can, Firestone, Stoney Creek Dairy, Amstel Brewery and its big-in-the-U.S. Grizzly beer.

A few random memories:

• Can you spot Agro Seafood at lower right? In the summer of '88 I stopped by there, Park and Cannon, to interview Lori Agro. That woman knew fish, be it octopus from Portugal — or tilefish with an evil stare. "See how the eye's sitting high?" she said. "That means it's fresh."

The other day I reached her dad, Louis Agro, 85. He says they eventually got out of seafood after the big supermarket chains started muscling in.

But the main family business had always been mushrooms, and they still do that, with Lori and her brother Sam very much involved. But Louis reports the Agro team expects "the final OK any day" for approval to grow a new crop: medicinal marijuana.

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• The Spectator is still around, Hamilton's oldest business, and the city would be diminished without it. But see those Spec trucks beetling around? Sadly, they've been extinct for some time.

When this map was made, the paper still had a fleet of its own. I distinctly remember a Spec truck pulling up to my house in the early '80s, and a man in a Spec uniform jumping out and handing me a Christmas turkey. Made you feel special and lucky. The trucks died and later, so did the turkeys.

• Look at the planes flying over Hamilton. At the time of this map, I had the airport beat, which was really just a job of chronicling one failed enterprise after another.

Top left corner is City Express, an airline run by the brash Victor Pappalardo. "Use it or lose it," he warned Hamilton, and made some enemies at City Hall. It wasn't long before we lost the service.

The airport struggles still. But the rest of Hamilton is on the way up. You can feel it and see it, especially downtown.

Grab a bowl of hot soup sometime. Examine the past, then go check out the future.

Click on map to enlarge.

Paul Wilson Paul Wilson writes weekly on people and places in Hamilton. Email | Twitter

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