HOW WE WORKED: No set menu for how Atlantic Canada's restaurants survive pandemic

Editor's Note: One year ago, our worlds changed. The first cases of COVID-19 struck in Atlantic Canada and the governments of P.E.I., Nova Scotia and Newfoundland closed businesses and put safety measures in place to keep people safe, which had a ripple effect on our livelihood and economy. This week, we’ll take a look back at how we lived, loved, worked, played and changed over the past year, and what lessons we’ve learned as we move forward.

A year after feeling helpless while watching COVID news from China and dreading the shoe that seemed likely to drop, George Christakos thinks he was ahead of the curve of concern.

“I remember having meetings here with staff . . . when Costco was sold out of sanitizer and (to others) it was kind of laughable,” said the owner of two restaurants, Brooklyn Warehouse in Halifax and Battery Park in Dartmouth.

“But I thought it was a serious thing.”

For people in the hospitality industry, the pandemic was indeed serious, disrupting livelihoods and lives, shutting some businesses for good.

“At the time, it was hard to know what the priorities were. I didn’t know when we would reopen — a year ago, nobody knew. Now we can look back and maybe laugh at how stressed out we were but at that time, in the middle of it, we had no idea what was going to happen,” said Christakos.

“We have no control over when there’s going to be another batch of community spread and we get shut down again.”

When the economic well-being of dozens of people depends on your business, and your business is battered by forces beyond your control, “there’s a lot of impact.”

“You’re juggling your staff’s EI, CERB, all that kind of stuff, as soon as a shutdown happens,” Christakos said.

Brooklyn Warehouse owner George Christakos poses for a photo in his North End Halifax restaurant. - Ryan Taplin

“My mom does payroll for a living, so we're pretty on top of getting things together for our staff, but we did what everybody else did, allow them to be laid off and then jump on the programs the government was putting out. And when we came back, we didn’t lose any service staff.

“But in the back, it was hard; we had to rebuild a lot of the kitchen staff because some of them just decided they’d prefer to take CERB, some were offered other gigs, more responsibility with higher-pay gigs. Some of my middle guys became top guys at other places, so we had a really rough time putting our kitchen personnel back together when we opened back up.”

Christakos said campaigns to, for example, buy gift cards from restaurants and hold on to them in order to give those businesses some income were meaningful, if mainly symbolic.

“Because it gets consumers thinking the right way,” he said.

"Everybody understands that they need to support their small business, or every city in the world is going to look like a business park.”
— George Christakos

“We’ve been a champion for local food since we opened in 2007, and obviously that was very popular before this happened but now it is much more ubiquitous. Everybody understands that they need to support their small business, or every city in the world is going to look like a business park.”

Never business as usual

North Rustico, P.E.I., doesn’t look much like a business park, but for the owners of the Blue Mussel Cafe, the decision isn't whether to open the seasonal restaurant this year but rather how to open.

Steve Murphy, who co-owns the restaurant with his wife, Christina McQuaid, has three plans depending on how things unfold: one for another Atlantic bubble, one for borders opening up beyond a bubble and one without a bubble.

Murphy said it takes about $25,000 to get the restaurant up and running at the start of each season, with maintenance to the building, inventory and staffing all factors. In a normal season, 80-90 people work in the restaurant.

"It's tough,” he said.

“You're trying to staff the right level. You're trying to guess how many staff you'll need. So, you don't want to over-hire but you don't want to under-hire. You're trying to figure out inventory. You're trying to figure out updates to the building.”

Christakos doesn’t have that particular concern at his year-round restaurants. But as the industry figures out how to get as close as possible to normalcy, his two properties are faring differently.

Proprietary concerns

“Brooklyn Warehouse has come out of the gates really, really well after this. I think it’s a mix of new attention to marketing; we have a manager who has been passionate and owned our social media, and that was just starting before the pandemic. Now, having her do that, post-pandemic, I think we’re seeing a tremendous amount of return on her work,” he said, also crediting the loyalty of regular customers.

“Battery Park has been doing really well, but we are not near where we were before. That’s because we’re feeling the ceiling of the restrictions at this place. People used to stand up, they would come here and congregate, meet friends and it would be sort of a Dartmouth High or (Prince Andrew High) reunion here, all the time, every weekend. We can’t do that anymore; people can’t get up and mingle.”

A significant reduction of revenue at Battery Park is connected to employment being down about 15 per cent at the two restaurants. However, Christakos feels that in some ways, he has more momentum coming out of the pandemic than he did going in.

Egon and Venkman added some of our house cut fries to their order tonight.. They thought it'd be a sure fire way to...
Posted by The Brooklyn Warehouse on Friday, December 11, 2020

“What I’ve learned is that businesses, like a child, I guess, mature in different ways and there’s different stages. Pre-pandemic, Brooklyn was trying to compete in a pretty saturated market in the north and west end of Halifax, with some excellent operators.

“We’ve had a lot of really good new places open up in the last few years, and Brooklyn was trying to draw attention to itself when there were a bunch of new, shiny things. But everyone took this long hiatus, and then it was kind of like a fresh start, a fresh race, to get back open,” said Christakos, who took measures like creating a specific takeout menu and bringing back brunch for the first time in years.

“We wanted to create a mix of products and services that we knew would be attractive and profitable. I remember thinking to myself, ‘We’re going to open Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday; I’m only going to open on profitable services.’ I think every customer would appreciate that, we’re getting put through the wringer here and I’m not going to open up if I’m not going to make money. People have been receiving it well and, to a certain extent, we became the new shiny thing again.”

— With files from Terrence McEachern.