The Greek Islands Restaurant

Hocking Avenue runs through the older part of the downtown, a block off the main commercial spines rather than on one of them, and number 45781 is where this restaurant is listed. That is a common enough position for an independent kitchen in Chilliwack. The downtown holds the highest concentration of them, across the blocks around Five Corners and in the District 1881 redevelopment on the former Chilliwack Cattle Sales site, but they are not arranged along a single restaurant row. They are distributed through a working commercial grid of more than 350 businesses, among banks, clinics, pharmacies and small independent retail. Anyone navigating by a mental map of the main streets can miss a whole side of the downtown that way.

Chilliwack Proper accounts for about 31 per cent of the city's population, so a downtown room has a residential catchment as well as whatever daytime trade comes from the offices and from Chilliwack General Hospital over on Menholm Road. That combination generally shows up in when a place is busy rather than in what it does, which is the sort of thing that cannot be known from here. Neither a phone number nor a website is published here, and for a restaurant that is a real limitation: there is no way to check hours, reserve a table or ask about takeaway before setting out. The address, at any rate, is exact, and the block is not hard to find.