A neon sign in the window of Lakeview, a 90-year-old restaurant in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods area, has long promised customers that the restaurant would be “always open.”
Once again, COVID-19 has changed the adage. Indoor dining rooms in Ontario will be closed for at least 21 days starting Wednesday, as will indoor facilities, from gyms to movie theaters. The province announced the restrictions on Monday, hoping to reduce hospital admissions as infections rise.
Lakeview CEO Frances Bell, whose husband bought the restaurant 14 years ago, understands the motivation. “I am not a scientist and I am certainly not a hospital planner, and I bow down to people who are much more knowledgeable in those areas than I do. We just want to make sure people are safe and get through this, ”he said.
Still, Monday’s news felt like one more hit.
“It’s really heartbreaking, to be honest. It is very difficult. We are not in a position where we can keep everyone (on staff) and we just built a team out of thin air again, ”said Bell. They had asked their accountant to help affected employees access help as quickly as possible.
“We have done our best,” he said. The restaurant had shipped large food orders before Christmas, when prospects were better. In contrast, in mid-December, the indoor dining capacity was cut in half. For a few days, his team closed the restaurant entirely for a “breaker and deep clean,” as several restaurants in the city made similar decisions.
Recently, some grants have come in that helped, Bell said. The province, in its announcement Monday, said others were also being considered. But Bell has been demoralized.
“We really pride ourselves on always being open. It didn’t matter what time of day it was a pleasure. We were there for you, ”he said. Bell recalled seeing the students crowding in for exams in the early morning, and the evening assistants and the breakfast crowd began to move around around 6 a.m. M.
Now the ensemble mocks their former status. He has been selling T-shirts with the slogan “Almost Always Closed 2020”. On the restaurant’s website, visitors are greeted with a hopeful message stamped on a twilight photo of the restaurant: “I really want to always be open.”
At the Stockyards, a small downtown restaurant that specializes in barbecue and fried chicken, owner Monique Nanton said business was not doing very well, but they were doing well.
“We’re surviving, so knock on wood,” Nanton said Monday afternoon.
The restaurant had always prioritized takeout, he said, and did not serve alcohol or have a sizable dinner operation. That made it easier to adapt, as did having a small staff. Under the new rules, he said they would continue as before. “I think we will be fine.”
Other Toronto business owners aren’t so optimistic. Hugo Croft-Levesque, owner of two kick-boxing gyms called 9Round, described the impending closure as a “hit to the stomach.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Croft-Levesque said. January is typically the biggest month for his gyms, he said, citing the return of members who may have paused their memberships over the holidays, as well as the influx of new customers for New Year’s resolutions to get in shape.
After the latest round of restrictions, he rehired former employees who were still available, plus six or seven others. Croft-Levesque had not spoken to his 17 employees immediately after the news, but said he would likely direct them to job insurance applications.
“I am devastated,” he said, also questioning the impact of the restrictions given the recent case counts. “It feels like the horses have come out of the barn and now we are closing the doors.”
At Queen’s Park on Monday, Medical Director Kieran Moore said the key metric to assess when restrictions would be lifted are hospitalization numbers. Recent trends, he said, indicated that the “vast majority” of Ontarians who became ill with the Omicron variant did not need intensive care or mechanical ventilation, “which is good news for us.”
But with this variant believed to spread more easily, hospitalization rates have risen, from 309 hospitalizations reported in Ontario on December 10 to 1,144 on December 31. The idea, Moore explained, was to “buy time” with the restrictions so that the hospital’s capacity was not overwhelmed.
Back in Lakeview, Bell thinks about the beginning of the pandemic. It had been so long since they closed the restaurant that they had no idea where to find the keys. For a few days, they left the restaurant open and hoped nothing bad would happen. They finally got a new set of locks.
“I really hope it’s only 21 days,” Bell said of the latest restrictions, expressing gratitude for the support of his neighbors, from takeout to returning customers when they can.
“We’re just trying to get back to that ‘always open’ tag line.”
Reference-www.thestar.com