Restaurant owners, food producers, girding for a rough ride.

Mar 18, 2020

The News contacted some restaurant and food business owners on Monday, in advance of the announcement on closure. The situation was fluid at the time as on Monday morning Ontario’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David Williams, said that restaurant closures were not being contemplated at this time. He also said that even a restriction to 50% seating capacity, which had been instituted in Quebec over the weekend was not on the cards in Ontario.

By the end of Monday, that had changed, and he said he was encouraging restaurants and bars to think about shutting down. This followed a statement by Prime Minister Trudeau early in the afternoon, at the tail end of a press conference, had been focussed primarily on the borders and restrictions on foreign travel.

Trudeau implored Canadians, whether they are sick or well, to stay home as much as possible and to communicate with each other by phone and email and video chat.

One restaurant, Muddy Waters in Verona, was contemplating putting reserved signs on half the tables in their restaurant after hearing the news on Monday. Business had been dropping off over the last two weeks, after a pretty strong January and February, even before any talk of restrictions. They said that they were expecting, given the pace of announcements by governments over the last few days, that the half capacity measures were not the end of it and they would likely be shut down before too long.

By Tuesday morning, they had been proven correct. At 8:30 the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, announced that all restaurants in the Province need to suspend sit down service, and can only offer take-out food.

That will mean immediate layoffs in the restaurants. In the case of Muddy Waters, for example, they might keep two people on at a time, a cook and someone on cash, and how viable they will be as a take-out only enterprise is anyone’s guess.

Other businesses were already feelings the effects of the dramatic downturn in the restaurant industry this month in Toronto, Ottawa and Kingston. Seed to Sausage, which producessells to high end restaurants, was in the midst of layoffs as early as Monday morning, as orders had been canceled already.