On any average night, Deja Vu Cafe is easily one of the busiest restaurants in the city.
From dinner time on, it's almost impossible to find a seat, and you'll often find people waiting to grab a table to sample some of the restaurant's famous chicken and legendary milkshakes.
But on a nice night late last week, it was a barren building.
And not just figuratively. All the tables, the chairs? Gone. Empty booths, no customers. And a skeleton staff running things.
All by design as owner Brandon Richardson and his crew did what they could to help keep the COVID-19 pandemic at bay.
“It's not going too bad, we're down at least 70 per cent, but we're staying afloat,” Richardson said on Friday afternoon. “We have five of us still working out of 15 on a Friday night... our take-out and delivery was always pretty good and it's better now, but for the inside there's nothing and that's how it has to be.
“We're still coming to work every day, we don't know what day it is, but we're still showing up,” he added with a good-natured laugh. “I haven't worked so hard in the last couple weeks than I have in the last couple years.”
The situation at Deja Vu is mirrored throughout the city – restaurants with shuttered doors, relying on delivery services to attempt to remain open in the face of a government-mandated shutdown of public gatherings throughout the province.
Beyond the financial side of things, it's a matter of also putting in the time and effort to keep things as clean as possible.
“The chairs, we put in quarantine, they're in the back room, and we just put everything away so people don't think we're open inside, out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of thing,” Richardson explained. “We have enough room for physical distancing for people who pick up their orders, and then we're sanitizing everything all the time... we're using (industrial-strength sanitizer) Quat on all the door handles and everything people might have touched. It's all stuff we've been doing since this took off.”
Their delivery driver is just as fastidious, wiping down much of the vehicle and the debit machine after every stop.
Other businesses, such as well-frequented pizza places like Family Pizza, T.J. Pizza and Rodo's Pizza report things being steady, while the Crushed Can has also seen brisk business on their take-out end. The popular The Mad Greek took advantage of this slower time to refurbish their restaurant with some fresh paint but will be re-opening this Thursday for delivery. Major chains also continue to offer delivery services, and fast-food restaurants remain open with regular drive through hours.
Restaurants offering Chinese and similar fare are also following COVID-19 practices, with most offering delivery on a store-by-store basis.
Provincial decree has closed the sitting areas of all restaurants in the province until further notice, with a further limit of 10 people in any gathering limiting a chance of remaining fully open.
That is how things are going to remain for at least the next month, something that businesses will have to work through in order to continue functioning.
“(We'll keep going until) the government says that's enough or when my wife says that's enough,” Richardson laughed.
A new Facebook group opened on Saturday night entitled 'No Business Left Behind' offering a rundown of business and restaurants that remain open and any specials they may have on offer. That group can be found by clicking here
