The Downtown Business Association wants you to be excited about Downtown Dining Week. It wants you to make plans for Downtown Dining Week.
Even though the event doesn’t begin till March 15, the Downtown Business Association held a kickoff event for the media on Wednesday at Birdog, the newest restaurant in the Century Hospitality Group chain. The reason? According to DBA executive director Puneeta McBryan, it’s to be able to get the message to people who like to plan out their lives. It’s about making sure the message gets out before we are inundated with Juno Awards hoopla. (Even though, looking at large number of seats available for the Junos on the Ticketmaster site, maybe “hoopla” is an overstatement.)
And it’s about stressing just how tough it is for restaurants right now, especially for those downtown, where many office workers remain at home. Some are only working flex hours. And that’s impacted the foot traffic downtown, outside of the big events.
“We still see a lot of restaurants, like Birdog where we’re standing in today, that the volume [of people downtown] just isn’t enough for them to be open for lunches, yet,” says McBryan. “We hope that changes. Dinners are still great, hockey games are great, concerts are happening, and those events are really driving a lot of restaurant revenue. But, in between those things, it’s still really tough.”
Over 60 participating restaurants will make special prix fixe combos at price points of $20, $35, $50 and $65. McBryan says that the price points still offer value for the diners, but ensure that, in these tough times, restaurants aren’t losing out when they serve these specials.
“It’s a conversation we’ve had again and again with our restaurants, over the last two years,” says McBryan. “With costs rising, it felt like something we needed to check in about. Is this something that they are still able to do, with rising inflation? You’ll notice we do have new price points, which allows businesses to offer more.
“It’s been tough on both ends. It’s tough for consumers, and it’s been really tough for restaurants to make prices work and deliver the meals and experience that people expect. I think Dining Week is that one little window where, if you’ve been avoiding dining out, you feel it’s been stretching your budget, this is a chance for the revenue to be enough that restaurants are able to offer great deals, but also for consumers to be able to know that they’re getting a great deal.”
Tony Le is the corporate chef for the Century Hospitality Group, which operates three downtown restaurants. On top of Birdog, there’s Parlour and Lux Steakhouse. He said supply chain issues and the skyrocketing cost of food have forced him to make some hard menu decisions, from changing which vegetables are served to how dishes are prepared.
“There are definitely some things that were not available because of shipping and exports,” said Le. “So we had to change some of those items. A staple I use at home, sriracha, for example, was almost impossible to get at one point. And it’s on a lot of our menu items. We either developed our own recipe, similar to sriracha, or we found different brands.
“A normal cut of rib-eye, for example, has gone through the roof. We’ve had to offer guests a more affordable cut. We put flank steak on our Lux menu, for example. That rib-eye is still there, but no everyone wants to spend $60 or $80 on a steak. So we had to give them some options, so we’ll sous-vide a flank steak overnight, break down those fibres so that you still get a very good steak, very good flavours and all those things. We can’t put it all on our customers, at the end of the day.”
McBryan said there are some things government can do to help downtown restaurants. Biggest on her list? Having provincial and federal employees return to regular downtown office hours, because having the population boost downtown is the biggest economic driver of them all.
But, there’s more.
“We’re really hoping that the federal government is considering loan forgiveness from COVID loans. Bills are coming due. Post-COVID realities are settling in…And we hope that Downtown Dining Week, as it always is, can be a needed shot in the arm.”
