If ever an eatery bore a fitting name, it’s Gus and Penny Marras’s Right Spot Restaurant near the corner of Wellington and Brock streets.

Since 1977, in a building where Sir John A. hung out his shingle in 1835, the Right Spot has been just that for countless downtown workers, walkers and shoppers. From bankers to bishops, barristers to bums — once inside the premises, titles are irrelevant.

“Everyone gets treated the same,” said Clarence Street lawyer and Right Spot regular Michael Hickey, popping in for an afternoon java fix and friendly banter with the proprietors.

“Gus and Penny are the soul of this place,” noted Hickey, who patronizes the place “twice a day and Saturdays for breakfast.”

Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find more congenial, cordial restaurateurs, in these parts and beyond, than this warm, gracious couple.

“It’s just like going home,” said Rt. Rev. Michael Oulton, Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Ontario. Oulton said the Right Spot reminds him of a similar, small haunt in his native Port Elgin, N.B. “You walk in and it’s like Cheers: Everyone knows your name.

“It really is a vanishing institution in the midst of all these chain restaurants, and Gus and Penny have given so much to the community just by being who they are.”

Some 36 years after the first meals slid off the grill, the Right Spot is closing. Though the exact date has yet to be finalized, the end is near. Gus, who turns 80 in December, and his charming bride of 50 years are retiring. “Gus is getting old and I’m not far behind,” Penny, 71, pointed out with a wry grin.

Perhaps a holiday is in order for this hard-working pair, whose last vacation was a trip to Daytona… a quarter-century ago.

“We’re going to miss this place, especially the people” reflected Penny, a mild-mannered farmer’s daughter from a region in Greece called Arcadia. “So many people have supported us, so many friends we have made. I’m a people person. Staying at home is no piece of cake for me.“

Her husband, a farmer’s son from Corinth, a hour southwest of Athens, concurred, calling the closing a “bitter-sweet moment.”

On the day a newspaperman visited, customer Randy Heaney strolled in with his fiance Marina Baptista.

“Gus and Penny are so good,” Heaney said over an order of ham and mashed potatoes. “They treat me just like a son.”

Heaney isn’t alone in that sentiment.

“They’ve been like family,” said Jack McCalpin, general manager of an adjacent shoe store that also opened in 1977.

“People keep tabs on them and, in a way, almost felt sorry for them because of the long hours put in.

“But Gus and Penny also keep tabs on you,” the shoe pusher added. “If you haven’t been in for a couple of days, they’ll ask about you. They’re truly genuine people who work extremely hard and treat everyone the same.”

As with any worker worth his salt in the food service industry, orders from Right Spot regulars are not so much taken as committed to memory and provided without request.

“If I wanted to change my coffee, I’d probably have to write a letter,” quipped McCalpin. “As it is now, once they see me coming, my coffee’s on the way, just the way I take it. Order once and they remember.”

Business has slowed significantly this century, what with businesses in the area, such as this venerable fish-wrap, relocating and shrunken staffs at others.

“It was good up until the late ‘90s,” explained Penny, “then the downtown workforce changed.”

Their secret to success was really no secret at all — just common sense.

“Try to be nice to people and prepare good meals,” Gus reasoned.”

In its salad days, all 62 seats, including six chrome-leg stools at the counter, filled up at lunchtime and during morning and afternoon coffee breaks.

In those days of permissible smoking, the Right Spot was a blue-haze haven for puffers.

“You couldn’t see your nose some days,” Dr. Ted Marras, youngest of Gus and Penny’s two sons, recalled from Toronto Western Hospital where he is — oh, the irony — a respirologist. “It was like a bingo hall.

“The big-picture memory for me are the customers, who were more like extended family,” added the physician, who, at 43, is two years younger than brother Peter. “That’s what made the Right Spot so special.

“When Dad’s arthritis worsened, or when the restaurant got really busy, people just served themselves and there was never a problem. It was just such a friendly atmosphere.”

When he purchased the building, handyman Gus almost single-handedly renovated the former home of Vandermeer Meats, tearing down walls, putting up new ones, installing kitchen equipment, everything but the wiring.

The building came with a narrow right-of-way laneway. Somehow, Gus always managed to park his car in the Right Spot’s tight spot without incident, leaving barely enough room on the driver’s side to exit the vehicle and virtually none on the passenger side.

“It was amazing how he could shoe-horn a car in there, but he did,” said Dr. Ted.

Penny’s asked if her husband ever once kissed the side wall with the sedan.

“Never. If there were any scratches, they were mine,” she admitted with a laugh, recounting the times she drove while her husband recuperated in hospital from two separate hip replacements, including a 24-day stay for the second procedure.

That convalescence marked the only time her “Mr. Gus” failed to punch the clock in 36 years on the job.

His wife outdid him in that regard. Penny was perfect, even after she shattered her left arm picking lilacs off a tree.

“I never missed a shift,” she said, revealing the lengthy scar on the elbow of the surgically-repaired arm.

Not lost on lawyer Hickey was the couple’s benevolence towards the less fortunate.

“They were particularly generous to people who couldn’t afford much.”

It’s hard to imagine that commendable policy being tolerated by the suits who run the big chain restaurants.

With Gus and Penny Marras, profits were important, though nowhere near as as important as people.