It's a terrible thing, losing a favourite place:Â a bar or a pub, a cafe or bookstore, a beloved hangout of any sort. It can leave a hole in your heart, something you can't help thinking about, worrying at it like you did as a kid, when your tongue was drawn to the space where a tooth used to be.
Luckily, Jo-Jo's was not that place for me.
![A sign on tables at Jo-Jo's on Queen Street the day after owner Stefan Ackerie announced it would be closing.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170722143018im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/h/7/u/c/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guh7cf.png/1487660560536.jpg)
The menu in this, its last month, is still pub-grub banal -Â pizza, pasta, burgers -Â with a bit of a pan Asian fry-up at the edges. All can be had in profusion and in higher quality elsewhere. Even burgers have gone upmarket.
But I won't be churlish, it was a sacred site for some people, and the news that it is closing is, in a real way, a loss for the city. To its history, if not its palate. There are better restaurants and bars now, hundreds of them. There have been better restaurants and bars than Jo-Jo's for many years.
![Jo-Jo's has been a mainstay of the Queen Street Mall for decades.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170722143018im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/d/u/g/1/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guh7cf.png/1487660560536.jpg)
But for a while there, after Queen Street was paved over for the mall and celebrity super-barber Stefan Ackerie got permission to put a few tables out on the balcony, Jo-Jo's really was the place to meet up and be seen. I was too broke to make my way up the escalator and sample the wares from four - count them, four! - international kitchens. My mates and I used to haunt the tables at Hungry Jack's across the way. Then I moved south to Sydney for many years and when I came back the city was changed and almost nobody said, "I'll meet you at Jo-Jo's." (A brilliant advertising hook, by the way.)
By then, at the top end of the table, Philip Johnson had opened e'cco. Thierry Galichet was perfecting his take on the French bistro with Montrachet and the invasion of super chefs from south of the Rio Grande was underway. Hundreds of great little cafes and restaurants, some known only to their local regulars, had popped up all over the city. I think Jo-Jo's got lost in this rush.
It was still there, and often crowded, especially at lunch time when the balcony tables were always in high demand, but the excitement which had attended its opening was entirely gone. The sense of possibility one got there, not just for a few hours of drinking and dining ahead, but for the city itself as it emerged from years of hillbilly backwardness and oppression, had dissipated.
And that's a good thing. A great thing, really.
It meant that a naff food court with tickets on itself and expensive but boring cocktails and factory-made cakes was no longer the most interesting destination in the CBD. It meant things were getting better. A lot better. And Jo-Jo's helped to start all of that, way back in 1980.
So pour one out for Jo-Jo's before she calls for last orders. She probably won't be missed but she should be remembered.
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