Canteen Owners to Open ‘Neighbourhood Pub’ in Dartmouth
DARTMOUTH – Try to snag a table at The Canteen on a busy night and staff usually smile apologetically, tell you they’re full, and suggest you find somewhere nearby and grab a drink until seats free up.
The downtown Dartmouth restaurant, run by former Top Chef Canada contestant Renée Lavallée and her husband Doug Townsend, often has to turn away diners.
Dartmouth’s main drag offers plenty of alternatives to The Canteen. But what self-respecting business owners don’t feel a tiny pang every time they turn someone away?
Certainly not Lavallée and Townsend. And it’s a big reason they decided to open a brand-new restaurant – right across the street from their current one.
The couple officially revealed their plans for their new Town’s End Tavern last week. The “neighbourhood pub” will take over the empty building at 21 Portland St., the former site of Best Kept Secret.
As Townsend told Huddle shortly after the announcement, he and Lavallée were worried that if they didn’t do it, someone else would.
“It was always known the potential of that property there, and it’s location, being one of the first major properties that people would see when they’re coming up from the harbour,” he said.
“We know we can operate a great establishment, and it’s kind of nerve-racking to think that somebody else directly across the street from us may not have the same vision or values as us.”
Strange to think, then, that the entire enterprise started as a kind of game.
Townsend says that after Best Kept Secret closed in early 2018, he and Lavallée would talk about what would be a good fit for the space, just for fun.
Eventually, they decided it was perfect for a pub. Now, they’re opening one there.
Townsend explains that Town’s End will feature a menu of mostly traditional pub fare (think nachos and chicken wings), a healthy dose of local seafood dishes, with a few twists thrown in. It will seat about 90 people and feature 16 taps that will showcase Nova Scotia craft beer and cider.
It’s a new business he says he’s proud to bring to downtown Dartmouth.
“We had lots of opportunities come our way from Halifax, from developers doing different things, but the more we thought about it, we were like, Dartmouth is definitely the community that we know best, and definitely the one we feel most passionately about,” he said.
Townsend says he likes that Dartmouth still feels like a cohesive community, even though more and more people are starting to wake up to the vibrancy of its downtown.
“It’s a pretty magical kind of set up here,” he says. “We’ve always kind of been the underdog and there’s a certain kind of energy you find in downtown Dartmouth that you don’t really find in other neighbourhoods.
“It lends itself to people wanting to collaborate, to work together to achieve something bigger.”
For Townsend and Lavallée, “something bigger” may just mean their two restaurants. But Townsend wasn’t willing to completely rule out the possibility of more.
“We don’t know if there’s anything else after this, to be honest with you. We have two kids and this is a big undertaking for us,” he says.
“We said we wouldn’t do anything beyond The Canteen until we knew that this place was running the way we wanted it to, and I think we’re getting to that point. But never say never, I guess.”