After Weekend Scramble, Halifax Restaurants Open For In-Person Dining
HALIFAX — Halifax restaurants and cafés got a welcome surprise last week when the provincial government gave them permission to reopen for in-person dining on January 4.
The December 31 announcement from the provincial government cut short a period of ramped-up regulations that forced restaurants in the HRM to close their dining rooms. The rules were initially supposed to be in place until January 11 but the period was suddenly shortened as Covid-19 case numbers remained low.
Although the Thursday announcement was welcome, the short timeline for reopening left restaurant and café owners scrambling to prepare.
As Gordon Stewart of the Restaurant Association of Nova Scotia explains, getting a restaurant up and running on such short notice is no easy task.
“The challenge will be that you really have to start from ground zero,” he says.
Most places will have to reorganize their schedule and in many cases re-hire staff. Then they need to ensure they enough food to actually serve new customers. They’ll have to get their kitchens up and running again, and probably tweak their menu based on what they have in stock.
“So it takes a fair bit of time, overall,” Stewart says.
Stewart guesses about 80 percent of local restaurants were able to open on Monday, and that more will probably follow in the coming days. Some will likely need even longer.
Scott MacLean, the co-owner of the Daily Grind, knows the stress of opening on short notice. He spent the weekend wrangling new deliveries from his local suppliers as he prepared the café to once again seat customers.
“We were doing a lot of hustling and running around, finding things that we usually order from our suppliers just on hand as quickly as we could, and restocking and everything so … we can be prepared to serve the customers,” MacLean says.
“It was definitely a rush to call your suppliers, get them on the ball to make sure that they deliver the product in time, but we’ve overcome it and we’re ready to go first thing today, which was nice.”
That work paid off, as most cafés and restaurants saw steady traffic throughout the day Monday.
Sonia Khadra, who manages Café Marco Polo in Dartmouth, spent the weekend cleaning the closed-down restaurant and salvaging what she could from the freezers that would be usable.
Although business Monday wasn’t as brisk as a typical day, she had customers waiting at the door for her to open in the morning and was run off her feet most of the day.
“Rush, rush, rush. I’m a little overwhelming, actually,” she told Huddle that afternoon.
Ian MacLeod, who owns and operates Hold Fast Café, says he was also much busier than he expected Monday.
“It was kind of like someone just turned on a switch again,” he said Monday afternoon. “It was great because it’s been a really hard four weeks of the second closure.”
MacLeod says he’s been weathering the financial hardships of closures the best he can as the pandemic has stretched on. Like most owners, he supports the government and the restrictions it has levied on restaurants but says his business is still hurting.
Having sit-down service return is one small step towards regaining his financial footing.
“I don’t rely a whole lot on sit-in traffic at my café, but it still just creates different habits for people,” he says. “This second shut down was good because everybody was doing what they were told to do… but yeah, it just made for some really hard weeks.”
Although MacLeod says he will likely survive the pandemic shutdowns, not every restaurant and café will be so lucky.
Although he doesn’t have specific numbers, Stewart estimates the pandemic has permanently closed hundreds of Nova Scotia restaurants.
“By the end of January, early February, we’ll probably have had 200 restaurants that will not reopen. Some because they’re some are sold, some have closed or converted, and some that just don’t have enough cash to get through for a variety of reasons,” he says.
Even restaurants that have so far survived feel that.
“You know, we’re scared,” MacLean says. “The winter is coming up here and we really need the help and the support from our community. We’ve been able to use some government options and funding and stuff, but it’s really not enough.”
However, Stewart says restaurant owners, on the whole, feel largely optimistic about 2021. He points to the fact that the province has issued 84 licenses for new restaurants since the pandemic began — 72 of them in the HRM.
“It’s interesting to see that entrepreneurship is big and strong right in the middle of the pandemic. If somebody had asked me I would have said there’s no way that many people start a new business, but here they are,” he said.
MacLeod is, in some ways, the perfect example of that entrepreneurial drive and optimism.
He opened Hold Fast Café shortly before the pandemic hit Nova Scotia and jokes he “[doesn’t] know what it’s like to operate this café outside of a pandemic.”
He says he’s organized his business so he can shut back down at a moment’s notice, has learned to provide the safest possible environment for his patrons, and finds optimism where he can.
“You know, it’s the support from my community around me has been very overwhelming and very humbling,” he says.
MacLean expressed similar sentiments.
“We’re so happy to welcome everyone back and get back to some kind of normal,” he says. “We closed for almost six weeks during the holiday when you usually get to see lots of familiar faces and that kind of thing. We didn’t get to do that this year. So I’m definitely excited for 2021 and having everyone back.”