C.V.M. Café
24 Main Street
Carberry

Designation Date:  June 12, 2007
Designation Authority:  Town of Carberry
Present Owner:  Privately Owned

The C.V.M. Café a modest mixed-use brick structure adapted to serve for more than a half-century as a local eatery in Carberry, represents the kind of unpretentious dining facilities that are synonymous with many small-town main streets. Built in the late 1890s, the highly visible building also complements and supports one end of an intact row of pre-1900 commercial facilities that help define Carberry’s historically designated business district. The café established in the 1940s by, and named after, A.R. Calvert, W.H. Vopni and M.P. Menlove, began as a conventional western-style outlet, complete with a formal second-floor dining room. It later became a Chinese restaurant and coffee shop operated by the Kwan Yuen family, members of a long-standing line of local confectioners and restaurateurs. The Yuen’s operation of the C.V.M. recalls an important Prairie tradition: the small-town Chinese restaurant. Nearly every small urban centre in Manitoba boasted a Chinese restaurant (and many still do), a source of mildly exotic food in an otherwise conventional North American market of dining-out cuisine.