A headline-grabbing Canadian Chamber of Commerce study in late August surmised that up to 60 percent of restaurants nationally could close permanently due to COVID-19.
So PentictonNow wanted to gauge the thoughts of local restaurateurs. Part I of our findings appeared yesterday. Part II begins now, with Black Antler co-owner Lynn Pepin and her surprising revelations.
"Honestly," said Pepin Wednesday afternoon, surveying a busy afternoon Black Antler scene, "our numbers are about double what they were this time last year. We have more staff on duty than this time last year. And we could use more but there aren’t any around."
There is, of course, more to the story. At this time last year, Black Antler was a brand new entity. It's clearly built a substantial clientele since.
Still, those numbers are impressive given that it's currently functioning at 50 percent its regular seating capacity, inside and out. And the seating at the bar has taken a complete pandemic hiatus.
"The hardest part was losing the bar," said Pepin. "We'd had to have either plexiglass or the bartenders wearing masks in order to have people sit there. And you'd also have barriers between groups of people."
But according to Pepin, the "trickiest part of the restrictions is keeping groups of six or more away from each other."
"We've had issues with groups of eight coming in. We sit them at two tables of four and then we see them moving around, then I get people emailing and getting upset that people are walking around."
The restaurant did grab the provincial government's interest-free $40,000 loan, but wasn't able to enroll in the wage subsidy program. "We weren't open last summer, so I couldn’t go off those numbers. And then in January and February, we were actually quite busy, so we didn't qualify."
The staff at Black Antler doesn't wear masks, and the place has a sense of pre-COVID normalcy to it.
"Our group is so close," said Pepin. "We're together all the time. We've had very frank conversations with the staff and they're keeping their bubble as small as possible."
Asked if there's a chance they'll close permanently due to the pandemic, she answered quickly.
"Absolutely not. In fact, we've talked about how long we could survive if we were shut down again (they were COVIDly closed from March 17th to May 23rd). And right now we have enough to survive a nine-month shutdown."
Meanwhile over at La Casa Ouzeria, co-owner Lia Portalaki said functioning under COVID has been a mixed bag.
"Our take-out business has never been better," she said this week.
"We were hoping to do $600 to $700 a night for takeout after we shut down the dining area in March. That would keep us from sinking. But by the first weekend, it started to get really busy.
"We started pushing our Facebook and Instagram pages. We were bringing in six packs from Cannery Brewing and Slackwater. We were giving gift certificates from Bum Wrap (Clothing Store). We were just trying to help the community."
Portalaki said take-out has remained strong, though dine-in has been harder to manage since its June 3rd re-start, referring to stuff like table spreading and table removal.
"But the hard part," she said, "is that a lot of people don't understand the policies. The downfall is that there wasn’t a set standard for every restaurant. They should have said this is going to be the standard. Everybody needs to abide by the same rules."
"Instead, you start seeing one restaurant doing it this way, another doing it that way. So everyone is trying to figure out the standard."
Like Black Antler (above), La Casa Ouzeria has had questions about dealing with large groups. "The toughest part on the customer's side is when they were coming in as large families with small kids, and they're asking why they can't sit together."
The restaurant took advantage of both the $40,000 small business loan and the wage subsidy program. And when Portalaki is asked if there's any chance it might close permanently due to COVID, she offers an emphatic no.
Still, she added, staff - and especially kitchen staff - has been hard to keep and hard to find in the days of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit.
"If it wasn’t us as a family here, running the business, being able to go from the front to the back to the bar, plunging a toilet, cleaning the restaurant, I wouldn't know how to answer that question."
Just a few blocks north on Main Street, Smugglers Smokehouse co-owner Josh Shulman said business this summer has been "good enough."
"It certainly hasn’t been a year where money was put in the bank. But we made it through, and the employees are paid, the rent is paid and the bills are paid. I guess that's what matters."
Those words carry extra impact when you realize Smugglers is the only venue in our survey that didn't benefit from either the provincial government's interest-free loan or the Canada Emergency Wade Subsidy.
There wasn't a large enough revenue hit for the former, and the restaurant didn't apply for the latter.
"I'm not a big government guy," said Shulman, adding that Smugglers was "one of the first places in Penticton to shut down indoor dining."
"But we did take-out. So when 20 or 30 percent of the restaurants in Penticton weren't even operating, we were busy. People had less options. I think it helped cement our position in the community. We were quarantine food."
Shulman, who also manages Freedom Bike Shop across the street, recounts a particularly weird period from the beginning of the lockdown.
"The entire staff was freaked out by the pandemic, so they asked for a layoff. We had zero staff at one point.
"So there was a point where we had no customers in the bike shop, no customers here, and then my phone would ring. I'd stop what I'm doing over there, come over here, unlock the door, cook an order, send it out, and go back to the bike shop. It was crazy times, man."
Smugglers staff doesn't wear masks because, said Shulman, "We don't do table service." But it did drop its seating substantially, from 32 to 14, and implemented "just about everything else that was recommended," including installing a $1,000 plexiglass barrier.
Shulman sounds confident when he says he can't see Smugglers closing permanently due to the pandemic. But he does caution that "There's a chance we could lose a few this winter."
