Tomorrow is my birthday (AGAIN!) and this year, along with my habit of starting My Day with the traditional birthday breakfast of cupcakes (yes, plural), I have decided that it is high time that I/we had lunch at a restaurant that every Canadian of a certain age would know of and want to eat at—Molly’s Reach.
Yes, THAT Molly’s Reach. It’s going to take us a car ride, a ferry sailing, and a bus trip to get there, but that seems like a small price to pay.
The year was 1972 and the team putting together an eager new Canadian TV show was about to go into production on was to be called “The Beachcombers”. They leased a vacant building at the end of Marine Drive where it butts up against School Road in Gibsons, a small town of under 1400 people (at that time) which anchors the southern end of British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. Gibsons would play itself and go by its own name. The show revolved (albeit slowly) around a community hub and local restaurant that the writers had named “Molly’s Reach”. The episodes would be based on the exploits of a couple of log salvagers, a profession that most of Canada had no idea even existed, who strove to make a living corralling errant drift timber that had broken away from log booms and made a floating dash for freedom. Musician, writer, and former CBC host Grant Lawrence put it best when he wrote that the show was about “a Greek guy and his First Nations buddy (who) drive around in their shitty boat collecting logs. Every week. For 20 years. It was like the Dukes of Hazzard on water and 100 per cent Canadian.”
I can’t improve on that!
What that early production team needed to find was a fair-sized space in which to build a sound stage that could be use as an indoor set to focus the show around. Large swathes of the show took place out on the water, of course, but the majority of the land-based stuff needed a plausible homebase.
Enter Molly’s Reach.
The fictional diner/restaurant was run by a woman (clearly named Molly) who was just trying to make a living for herself and her two grandkids, Hughie and Margaret. The character of Molly was both tough and warm and her diner needed to reflect that. It was designed to be welcoming and approachable but with enough unpolished edges to make it believable. Just like any diner in any Canadian town would be, both then and now. They made it a homey spot, and it evolved into being one of the players in the TV show along with the actors.
The building itself had been sitting at 647 School Road since it was built 100 years ago in 1926, the same year the town was incorporated as Gibson’s Landing (the name changed to just ‘Gibsons’ by popular vote in 1947). Back in those early days, it was a slimmer version of itself and had been built to serve as a grocery store for the community. It soon morphed into more of a used furniture and hardware store by the looks of the photos from the 1930s. They say that at one point it was even a liquor store, but the building had never been used as a restaurant.
Fortunately, when The Beachcombers team was looking for a place to set up shop, the building was sitting empty, awaiting its next incarnation, and the production company was able to sign a lease and get right to work to trick out the inside to resemble a diner, complete with an ‘office’ that the character of Molly allowed the character of Nick to set up in the back.
The show used this building for the entire 18 years that the show unbelievably ran for. By the time Beachcombers (the The was dropped in the 80s) was finally brought to a close in 1990, they had racked up a whopping 387 half hour episodes. In its heyday, The Beachcombers was rated second only to Hockey Night in Canada in viewership. I can believe that.
After the show was taken off the air (against its will, reports claim) Molly’s Reach was left shuttered as the town of Gibsons settled into their next version. The building was bought and renovated to become an actual working restaurant in 1995, enjoying the reflected notoriety of the show’s fame in both Canada and in at least 50 other countries where it had aired. From 1995 until 2025, it had its ups and downs. Sometimes it was a viable restaurant and, when times were tight all across the country, it was shut down to wait for its next owner.
Another of the restaurants in Gibsons was at a crossroads themselves at the end of 2024. They needed to find a new location because their building’s owner was moving in a different direction with the property, which left the established business without a brick-and-mortar landing place. By sheer luck, Molly’s Reach was looking around too and by late January of 2025, the restaurant was back in business in new digs. The latest owners brought their knowledge of what worked for them in the past to Molly’s Reach, while continuing to respect this building’s long back story and the fact that it had somehow became a cultural icon.
Rest assured—the sign still reads Molly’s Reach and is followed by the tag line that we all know and expect, Welcome Back!
I am definitely looking forward to tomorrow’s lunch and suspect I will fan-girl over being able to eat at Molly’s Reach in person. I am Canadian after all.