The Covid Hustle
A lot can be gleaned from the ways in which restaurateurs and local food producers have grown and adapted since March. Already operating on razor-thin margins, the global pandemic has forced chefs and makers into new roles, seeking novel avenues of business in order to survive. Food service has become an essential business, those that operate those businesses are frontline workers.
Jumping into an unusual world of business as usual, contactless grocery pickups, online sales and web fulfilment — the soft science of e-commerce logistics — are only a few ways in which chefs, restaurateurs and farmers are working to provide sustenance to the city. With so much on the line and only so many hours in the day, owners are moving into creative business models while juggling the health and safety of their staff, guests and ultimately the business’ survival. For a year that has trudged along for every one of us, they're keeping their communities fed while offering a guise of normalcy.
Warm weather has provided temporary solace; takeaway has succeeded for those wanting to dine at safe distances in parks. Alcohol was okayed to be sold to go, creating curated neighbourhood bottle shops. Street closures allowed the expansion of patios, a welcome and ideally permanent feature to the city’s landscape.
This is not an exhaustive list, it doesn’t even scratch the surface. There are too many small, independent and family-run businesses to name here. There are undoubtedly a handful near you.
Grounded Kitchen, Coffee & Bar
2020 marks the 10th anniversary of Amir Rahim’s café and scratch kitchen. Atop his decade-marked success, he’s reopening as a new restaurant during a pandemic. Adapting quickly thanks to his catering-focused webshop, Rahim was also able to convert a portion of his café into a scratch grocery store offering embellished essentials and treats.
Before the pandemic, Rahim catered to the daily downtown core — desk jockeys on a break, lunch meets or the ever-important happy hour — and didn't focus on his neighbourhood.
He and chef Rob Senese have been changing that with their dinner menu, enticing locals into becoming regulars. Highlighting the importance of safe and accessible nights out, the team creates a personalized five-course dinner for two. Served blind, guests call ahead to make reservations, letting the kitchen know of any dietary restrictions and choice of cuisine. With that, staff will create a wholly unique dining experience. With only 28 seats available inside and out, reservations go quickly.
Corner Peach’s Corner Store
Co-owners Emma Campbell and Caroline Murphy have turned their cosy restaurant space into a corner store selling a range of goods from salt and flour to Spanish conservas, frozen meats and their take on frozen McCain Deep’n Delicious cakes.
Early on, while continuing to bake bread, they offered an online guide to making sourdough, in addition to offering starter to anyone keen on jumping in. They had lineups around the block. When the time came to reopen, the duo assessed the restaurant's position. To them, the essentials had shifted: a nice bottle of wine and good bread at home were more essential than dining out, and they catered to a pared-down dinner-at-home model.
They’ve been able to hire some staff back to pack and stock online orders and prep during the day. Reminiscent of cottage-bound fry shack lunch stops, they’ve begun offering burgers, fries and poutine to go — whatever they can do with a safely distanced kitchen team of one.
The duo has managed to continue cooking, hosting pop-ups at Arlo Restaurant's backyard barbecue on Somerset St. W. and Matron Fine Beer’s beer garden in Prince Edward County. Staying fluid and willing to change quickly has been the mode of survival and Campbell and Murphy have a few more tricks up their sleeves as they move forward into cooler months.
Dominion City Brewing Co.
Known already for its citywide community work, the pandemic hasn’t slowed Dominion City down. It's helped raise more than $35,000 for the Gloucester Emergency Food Cupboard through online sales. Moving forward, it aims to tie beer releases to charities monthly.
With their taproom shuttered, the folks at Dominion created a beer drive-through: Order online, honk when you arrive and the team will place it in your trunk. Voilà. The epitome of contactless.
Expanding to free city-wide deliveries, they added beers and wines from other producers to their lineup. “We try to keep it Ontario-based as our running theme,” explains Jesse Albota, purveyor of the brewery's Friends of the Dominion initiative, a collection of producers that they’ve brewed or know. “We’re trying to get things that Ottawans don't have much exposure to.”
Red Door Provisions
Quick on the draw to release an online platform, questions swirled for Lauren Power: Were coffee and pastries really top of mind in a pandemic? Nonetheless, she geared up.
“We really didn't take any time off for it, it was clear immediately that we needed a web platform or we would sink very quickly,” she explains. She built her website in 48 hours as soon as she was allowed to sell again.
Her Beechwood café proved to be an anchor to her New Edinburgh community and she quickly saw that she needed to scale up. Luckily for Power, the production facility that she owns with Brian Montgomery, owner of Oat Couture, allowed her to produce big enough batches — and social distance — to keep the web store flush.
In the midst of managing the safety of her staff and a new web shop, Power hosted a bake sale fundraiser for the Black Legal Action Centre and Black Lives Matter movements. “It's a balancing act. I want to continue to propel the business, but I don’t want to take on unduerisk,” she says, concerned for the well-being of her staff and the public.
Power and her team are staying safe, busy and inspired through all of this. “We always want to continue to grow and develop our brand,” she says. “The most motivating thing about COVID and being a small business owner is adapting to change and seeing my friends being creative and awesome.”
Little Victories Coffee
May marked four years of innovative coffee by Jeremie Thompson and Andy Bassett. Initially pulling lattés from a nook in a Hintonburg bike shop, the third-wave roasters built their Glebe café themselves. Their virginal Elgin shop sits empty, ready, whenever the time may come to christen it.
Co-owner Bassett focuses on what he can control. He jokes that the interior of the Glebe location now looks like an Amazon warehouse: Printers and packing equipment fill the space. “We wanted to give people more accessibility to making good coffee,” he says, “without having to get them to leave their homes for it.” With the closure of so many wholesale accounts, Bassett and Thompson had to find a new avenue of sales, moving all their inventory online.
Then reopening in Stage three raised an issue: The Glebe café would only allow two guests in at a time, grinding a fast-paced business to a halt. Rather, they dove into an idea with which they had always toyed — a customized shipping container shop. On Day 1, amongst the colourful graffiti of the quiet courtyard, they had a lineup from 7:30 a.m. onwards. Their success has allowed them to bring back their staff for packing orders and brewing coffee to go.
Knowing full well that the current setup wouldn't be feasible during the colder months, the two are planning for the unknown. This may mark the launch of their flagship downtown location.
Burrow Shop
“If this was going to be a long-term thing, this wasn't something I could wait out,” says former chef and co-owner of Burrow Shop, Trish Larkin. “Bills keep coming in. I couldn’t foresee myself just sitting around and weathering the storm.” Knowing that kombucha alone wouldn’t keep them going during a pandemic, she and Jon Lomow, her business partner, adapted Buchipop into a grocery store, selling locally made and essential foodstuffs.
Larkin credits her culinary network for the shop’s initial offerings: Pascale’s All Natural Ice Cream and Top Shelf Preserves were among the first on board. She’s been adding inventory and purveyors weekly, creating a much-needed grocer in Little Italy’s food desert.
Larkin and Lomow were fortunate to have the space and infrastructure to house all the goods, while Chad Hogerland, their newly hired chef (because they were in the midst of opening a restaurant, naturally) experiments with fermentation and creative to-go items.
Parlour x Dish
With almost two decades of experience in the catering world with her business DISH, Erin Clatney knows how to transform a space and adapt in different settings. Taking over the space formerly occupied by the Ottawa Bagelshop and Deli after they downsized on Wellington Street West, Clatney was busy for almost eight months with renovations and ensuring everything was up to code for an event space that could hold up to 250 people. And then. “We threw all our capital into a space that couldn’t open,” she says.
Clatney’s biggest challenge was having to lay off her staff and the financial devastation of building out a space without a firm idea of when they might be able to open. Through DISH, a smaller team was able to offer take-home meals — providing a service that was good for the mental health of everyone involved. And in July, Parlour x Dish was able to open, with an outdoor takeout spot on the corner of Wellington Street and a gem of a licensed patio just around the corner on Grange Street.
On weekends, Supply and Demand has been on the Parlour patio shucking oysters and Clatney has more plans to collaborate with neighbouring friends and businesses. She says it’s been great to see the outdoor space become a neighbourhood spot, but also a bit of a destination patio for folks around town.
Retrospectively, Clatney says she is not sure how she has managed the stress of getting her family and businesses through this time, saying there’s been a lot of trauma, but a lot of beauty. The Canadian Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) and the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) have been immensely helpful in ensuring that she can bring her team back to work safely. Come fall, she’s picturing heaters and warm blankets outside and winter may bring hot cocoa with markets featuring favourite producers. “We’re in it for the long haul,” Clatney affirms.
North & Navy
“Death by a thousand cuts” is how Adam Vettorel describes the challenges thrown at restaurants throughout the pandemic. From bigpicture concerns such as constantly re-examining how the restaurant is operating, assisting staff to enrol for CERB and ensuring the staff still at work are comfortable, to smaller details such as worrying about which take-out containers are best, the chef and co-owner of North & Navy says he is getting through each day by staying busy.
He launched a podcast; he’s working on getting a second restaurant ready to open (in the Glebe, in the building where he and co-owner Chris Schlesak first met), he helped out Chef Joe Thottungal, who has been leading efforts to cook for those in need with Food for Thought; and he partnered with Little Victories Coffee to provide breakfast and lunch items at its new shipping container coffee spot.
There have been silver linings. The city had been slow to approve the restaurant’s application for a patio in previous years, but now it is upand running, complete with strings of twinkling lights and vintage furniture (Vetorrel says Schlesak, who has had the vision for the patio in his head for years, was “like a kid in a candy shop” building it out.) The first Friday of takeout was “traumatizingly busy,” but has since smoothed out. They have opened the restaurant for limited indoor dining and almost all their staff is back at work (with a bathroom steward, and the patio, it takes more servers to serve half the clientele they used to pre-pandemic.)
The camaraderie amongst his staff and colleagues in the food industry makes Vettorel feel “almost uncomfortably grateful” — probably the most heartwarming of silver linings.
Somerset Village
Councillor Catherine McKenney prefers to call the road closures in Somerset Ward “road openings” as streets close to vehicle traffic, but become safe spaces for pedestrians and cyclists to access while maintaining appropriate physical distance from one another. Though their initial request for a small car-free strip in Somerset Ward for constituents to access essential services in the core received pushback from others on city council, the summer saw far more enthusiasm for the idea.
With support from the Bank Street and Somerset Village BIAs, several road openings have allowed restaurants to extend their patios into the streets over weekends and have been enthusiastically embraced by residents roaming on foot. “It took on a life of its own,” McKenney says, “go down there on a Saturday... it’s like nothing we’ve experienced in the city before.” Frank Street has become part of Fauna’s patio, Flora Street has turned into a beer garden for Flora Hall. Bank Street, with its many businesses and restaurants, seems natural as a pedestrian promenade. Somerset Street West between O’Connor and Bank is like a physically distanced block party, with tables from each restaurant’s patio spilling onto the street.
Moving forward, McKenney optimistically expects these street closures will happen every year and they laugh when people tell them this is the most exciting thing the city has done. “It’s not that radical.” But McKenney is thrilled by the positive reception and hopes that this will help restaurants in the area get through the colder months.
Farinella
Siblings Nina and Cesare Agostini were gearing up for a big summer, only their second in business, when the pandemic hit. The melting of the snow means the siblings and their colleagues can go “full out” churning out gelato and pizzas with their spot bustling in Little Italy. With a just-acquired liquor licence for their patio, they were banking on a profitable summer. “We even got our own beers,” Cesare says with a sigh, referencing their collaboration on a house Italian lager brewed by Cameron’s Brewing in Oakville.
But by the end of the day on March 17, their staff of 30 was down to six people (including Nina and Cesare) and they were not eligible for the CEWS because they had not yet been open for a full year. While Cesare feels lucky to be running a pizzeria — a classic takeout food — Farinella was not actually set up for it because the storefront was always so busy. But they've used this time to switch exclusively to takeout (even with patio weather, they’ve opted to use their new outdoor furniture to make a barrier around their pickup area) and Cesare credits the collaboration amongst their team for pulling it off. Keeping up with the phone calls for orders remains a challenge, but a welcome one these days.
The open-concept kitchen typically looks out into the busy shop, where folks usually crowd in to admire the colourful swirls of gelato, so seeing it empty as they pull pizzas out of the ovens weighs on the team’s morale. At the end of the day, staff, suppliers and the landlord are all getting paid and happy customers are walking away with Farinella’s signature metre-long boxes.
Baccanalle
The week things started shutting down, Resa Solomon-St. Lewis was just putting up a sign on the door of her café announcing new safety measures when she saw that the physician’s office across the street was closing. With her café housed in a medical office building, her built-in clientele was effectively gone. "It was just us waving to the pharmacist across the hall,” Solomon-St. Lewis says.
So, she flipped things around. While Capital Fare Café operated selling from-scratch breakfast, lunch and snacks during the day, Baccanalle was more about catering, events and farmers’ markets. With the café quiet, the Caribbean fare from Baccanalle became the focus, with weekend dinner services for takeout and delivery Thursday through Saturday. Initially, her sister in New York City was helping with the online logistics, but Solomon-St. Lewis was quick to join Love Local Delivery — a delivery service for independent restaurants spearheaded by chefs and restaurateurs Harriet Clunie and Donna Chevrier. The service launched in March and now includes more than 60 restaurants.
With the café now open again for takeout with limited hours, farmers’ markets in full swing and Baccanalle dinners being delivered across the city, Solomon-St. Lewis says it’s like running three small businesses without any certainty of how the next day will go. “We’re exhausted. It’s just been a stressful time,” she says, adding that collaboration is getting them through and she is heartened by the co-operative spirit of folks in the industry.
Arlington Five and Cooking for a Cause
Jessie Duffy heard someone describe this year so far as a “Corona coaster” and that feels apt to the coffee-shop owner. She shut the doors at Arlington Five a few days before the provincial shutdown was mandated — at the time there was no guidance, no protocols, no way to really know what was safe. “Our whole thing about the space is the community aspect” she says, explaining that a “disembodied arm” handing out a takeout coffee through the window just didn’t seem like the way to go.
Since then, they’ve created a small patio in the back that has become popular in Centretown (“That’s Ottawa right? Outdoor space is Mecca,” Duffy laughs) and their indoor space has turned into a production site for the lunches they are making for Cooking for a Cause Ottawa.
Run by the Ottawa Community Food Partnership (OCFP) out of the Parkdale Food Centre, Cooking for a Cause Ottawa was created early into the shutdown with the goal of getting nutritious food to those who need it, while helping small food businesses continue to operate through the shutdown.
Within two weeks of the shutdown, the Cooking for a Cause Ottawa partners had food going out across the city to try to fill the gaps created by closures at regular access points (locations that had previously offered space for a drop-in meals no longer could.) As the OCFP co-ordinator, Erica Braunovan’s day quickly became filled with scheduling pickups and deliveries of meals across the city from restaurant and catering partners such as The Red Apron, Royal Prince Cuisine, Marcie’s Café, Bread by Us and the Urban Element, to name but a few.
There’s no doubt that COVID-19 has laid bare many of the inequities in our society, not the least among them being steady access to nutritious food.“Even at 4,000 meals a week — we could do more. There’s a larger need than we’re able to meet,” Braunovan says.
Though the OCFP has submitted proposals for funding from provincial and municipal governments to help them through to the end of 2020, they still rely on donations from the community and individual restaurants have launched their own GoFundMe campaigns to fundraise for their contributions to Cooking for a Cause.
At Arlington Five, customers are able to purchase a lunch for themselves and lunch for a neighbour. Duffy describes it as an “easy-give model” for folks stopping by and it’s starting much needed conversations about the opportunities to enshrine the values of community care required to get through tough times. For her part, Duffy says she feels fortunate to be working with such game-changers. It’s community over everything from now on.
Everybody’s pandemic story is unique, but there are common threads running through these experiences — collaboration, innovation and familiar twists and turns. “The one thing I’ve learned from this is to never try to predict what I’ll be doing in a month from now,” Adam Vettorel says. Whatever happens, Vettorel hopes that the public will be patient and supportive of changes small businesses make to stay afloat.
These are just snapshots of the business gymnastics being performed across the city. To some, this forced shift in business has meant new opportunities, and an almost welcome shakeup in the industry. For others, it’s been a struggle to continue to make ends meet, and find a new “normal” that works for everyone involved. For all, as always, the only constant is change.
