The Den Pub and Carvery. Photo Credit: Shane Clausing

By Shane Clausing

Grande Prairie bars and restaurants

Grande Prairie restaurants and bars slowly returning to sense of normalcy

May 29, 2020 | 1:23 PM

It’s now just over two weeks since restaurants and bars were given the green light to re-open in the Province of Alberta.

Since re-opening, the province has laid out strict rules and guidelines that all restaurants and bars must follow if they chose to re-open.

These guidelines include:

• Spacing out tables six feet apart.
• Limiting a restaurant and bars capacity to 50 per cent capacity.
• Making aisles wide enough to allow room for people to maintain physical distancing.
• Removal of table condiments and other frequently touched items (for example, salt and pepper shakers, ketchup, hot sauce).
• Consider keeping music to a low volume to help customers avoid leaning in to hear each another.

Todd Zahorodniuk, the owner of The Den Pub and Carvery says since re-opening, he’s seeing customers slowly coming back, and that they are obeying the rules put in place by the provincial government..

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“We’ve been very careful. The customers are very well behaved with it (the rules). They respect what has to be happening and obviously there’s a lot of people that aren’t going out yet because they’re still concerned, and we could only do 50 per cent capacity. It’s a little quieter, but the people that are coming out are having a great time and it’s fun to see.”

“I think there’s a lot of people that are still hesitant. I respect the people that are concerned, but we try to keep it as clean as possible and whatever time it takes for this to blow over we’re just going to deal with it.”

While The Den was closed, Zahorodniuk and his business did operate their restaurant online through apps like Skip the Dishes. He says the online orders really picked up over the last several weeks, and they plan to rollout more deals in the coming weeks.

While re-opening has gone well for The Den, Zahorodniuk says that the biggest thing that has hurt his business is the loss of late night traffic, but he’s optimistic about bouncing back.

“There really hasn’t been a huge challenge to anything, it’s pretty simple guidelines, we had to move some tables around. I guess if there was a challenge, we just aren’t getting as many people in because people are concerned, and we can’t do the capacity.

“We can’t do any live music, no dancing or that kind of thing, we don’t even stay open past midnight, one o’clock in the morning. I think that’s the biggest thing, you don’t get any late-night traffic, but summertime is a little slower anyway. Once we get rolling again and people start to dance and have fun it’s going to be a fun time again.”

Since re-opening, a problem that several bars across the province have run into is trying to get rid of the excess beer that they had ordered prior to COVID-19. As a result, some bars on opening weekend had flat beer coming out of their taps

Zahorodniuk tells EverythingGP that while The Den Pub and Carvery beer did have an excess of beer leftover, the lines are clear, and drinks are good to go.

“We untapped our kegs and cleaned our lines right when we had to shut down. I had to throw out seven or eight partial kegs, but then when I re-tapped everything I was able to keep everything nice and fresh because our lines were so clean and we’re using beer gas. Our beers been good right from the start, so we’re ok.”