Old Road BBQ Is Closed But Aaron Emery Keeps On Cooking For Frontline Workers

TRURO – Aaron Emery doesn’t know if his business will survive Covid-19, but for weeks he’s been doing everything he can to make sure frontline workers do.

Emery runs Old Road BBQ in Truro. Since the Covid-19 pandemic began he’s been cooking and delivering free meals to nurses, EMT, and even police working in the aftermath of the tragedy in Portapique.

His efforts started as a one-off lunch delivery to a local emergency room, but have grown into an operation that has him preparing nearly 500 meals a week for first responders in communities across the province.

“It’s tough for us to stay at home during this pandemic, but it’s a hell of a lot tougher for folks not to stay at home and turn up and work in the ER each day wondering if they’re going to get their kids sick, wondering if they’re going to get themselves sick,” Emery says. “We can do our part by continuing to cook for them.”

Before the pandemic, Old Road BBQ ran a promotion that highlighted businesses and charities in the community by surprising them with free meals.

When Covid-19 “started to get serious” in Nova Scotia Emery says it just made sense to start giving those free lunches to healthcare workers.

“And then all of the sudden it became just super clear that this Covid-19 thing was not going away and it switched from a marketing and community highlight thing to just, like, this is our duty really to support frontline healthcare workers,” he explains.

As Covid-19 brought his business to a halt, Emery was forced to lay off all his employees. But he stayed on as a one-man show to keep cooking and delivering meals.

Eventually, he formalized the initiative into Cooking For Canada and began collecting donations to keep it going. As he did, he expanded his reach to a wider range of workers in communities stretching far beyond his Truro base.

So far, he’s been able to snag enough donations to keep a week or two ahead of his costs. Meanwhile, the project has grown and last week he says he prepared and delivered about 450 meals.

Emery says the goal of Cooking For Canada is not to simply plunk food in front of people, but to give overworked and overstressed frontline workers a chance to “press the pause button” with a “real” meal.

“Anybody can deliver calories to your mouth, what we want to do is something much, much bigger than that. It’s something emotional, it’s something supportive, it’s something community-based,” he explains.

“Doctors and nurses and most hospital workers, they’re not short on calories by any means… but what we’re trying to do is connect them with really good food that sort of lets them press the pause button for even ten minutes, just to get a breath of fresh air and a mental health check of sorts.”

The importance of that mission became even more apparent to Emery in the wake of the mass shooting that rocked the town of Portapique two weeks ago.

In the days following the shooting Emery switched his focus to feeding police and other first responders working in the aftermath of the tragedy.

“That response process has been more difficult than I could have ever imagined,” Emery says. “Seeing the pressure they’re under… it’s just a whole different level that I wasn’t prepared for.”

He says his experiences delivering to those people and healthcare workers on the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic has affirmed his belief that a strong community will be the key to recovering from all of the hits Nova Scotia has taken this year.

“I have no idea how we’re going to get through this as an economy, but we have to get through this as a community.”

“Some of that is kind of touchy-feely bullshit, but it’s got to be true. Because, honestly, economically we don’t know: restaurants aren’t coming back, small businesses aren’t coming back, people are going to go bankrupt, and the only hope is that first and foremost we keep the community together. And if we keep that community together then we’ll rebuild something. I don’t know what that looks like, but we have some hope of rebuilding something.”

That rebuilding won’t happen right away, and until it begins Emery points out that police, nurses, and other first responders will remain on the front lines of the pandemic.

His ultimate goal with Cooking For Canada, he says, is to make sure they are taken care of as long as that’s still the case.

“Everybody’s flooded with support for those first couple of weeks when emotions are high. But we want to be there once you take emotion out of it, and once things haven’t gotten any easier for the frontline workers. When our emotions are no longer moving us to wave that flag, we still want to be there to support them,” he says.

To the end, Emery is beginning to bring other restaurants on as partners in Cooking For Canada, with the goal of turning it into a province-wide (and eventually nation-wide) effort to put good meals in front of healthcare workers as long as the pandemic lasts.

He says he already has more partners signed up and ready to go, all he needs is the funds to put them into action.

He says he’s not sure if Old Road BBQ will make it through the Covid-19 pandemic, but that he’s determined to “go down cooking” if it does.

“If I can never be a 65-seat restaurant where dozens of people sit down around tables and share platters together, if that never happens again well then at least we’re going to continue to try and deliver a little bit of that experience to these heroes on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic for as long as we can,” he says.