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Old Posted May 10, 2021, 11:45 AM
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Some Ottawa restaurateurs have pivoted to more pandemic-resistant businesses
"You couldn’t survive without some kind of pivot."

Peter Hum, Ottawa Citizen
Publishing date: May 10, 2021 • 1 hour ago • 4 minute read


Last year, when the pandemic brought its hammer down on veteran Ottawa restaurateur Richard Valente’s businesses, he realized he had to switch to Plan C — as in cannabis — as quickly as he could.

The owner of the Fratelli restaurants in Kanata and Westboro and Roberto Pizza in Little Italy knew he would one day open a marijuana shop. The ambition just didn’t seem as urgent until the novel coronavirus turned everything upside down.

“We weren’t planning to open (the cannabis store). We were just going to sit on the licence,” Valente says. “We weren’t thinking about it (opening) until the pandemic hit.”

While lockdown after lockdown robbed him of customers for his food, Valente stepped up his plans to become a pot entrepreneur. Now he has three recently opened BlueBird Cannabis locations in Ottawa’s suburbs. There are two in Kanata plus a third in Manotick, and a fourth is to open next month in Almonte.

“I’ve definitely diversified, thank God,” Valente says.

Since the spring of 2020, everyone in Valente’s line of work has had to pivot, and occasionally repeatedly so, to make their restaurants more viable during the pandemic. Expanding takeout service was a must for most restaurants. Many eateries from Corner Peach in Chinatown to Oz Kafe in the ByWard Market to Das Lokal in Lowertown to Zolas in Bells Corners saw value in offering customers pantry items and non-perishables — not to mention wine, beer and cocktails after the Ontario government last year allowed restaurants to sell bottles to go, provided that food was sold with them.

But Valente is among the much smaller group of Ottawa-based food entrepreneurs who have larger lateral moves, betting that more pandemic-proof businesses will be winners even as the impact of the novel coronavirus hopefully recedes.

“The good thing about the cannabis stores: COVID doesn’t seem to stop people from coming,” Valente says.

Pat Nicastro, owner of La Bottega Fine Food Shop, has also put his money into a new, hopefully pandemic-proof venture after COVID-19 prompted the closure of the 24-seat restaurant at the back of his popular Italian grocery store in the ByWard Market.

The restaurant has never re-opened during the pandemic, and the store’s catering business has been “pretty much demolished,” Nicastro says. Food from the store’s kitchen accounted for more than 20 per cent of its revenue, he adds.

Meanwhile, the emptying of Ottawa’s downtown core cost La Bottega customers. But the grocery business soldiered on and began offering deliveries through the fledgling Ottawa-based business Trexity.

That service “was a missing key in our business to make it work,” Nicastro says. The grocery store does “tons of deliveries every day through Trexity.” Not only that, Nicastro was so impressed by the service that he became an early seed investor.

“That’s how much we believed in them,” Nicastro says. “We saw where our business was heading.

“We just had to adapt. Online was always there, but we had to take it extremely seriously.”

Meanwhile, Nicastro adjusted Lollo, his salad-centred eatery beside La Bottega, to sell more wine. The casual restaurant had always been licensed since it opened three years ago. Now he operates ByWard Wine Market from inside Lollo, offering almost 200 wines, plus snacks that make the bottle purchases legal.

“That basically saved Lollo,” Nicastro says. “You couldn’t survive without some kind of pivot.”

For Valente, an immediate crisis when the pandemic began was the disappearance of customers from Honey Coffee Bar, the business his wife and nephew’s wife owned in Kanata’s Signature Centre on Terry Fox Drive.

“The coffee business took an absolute beating. It literally came to a dead halt,” Valente says. “You got to go into panic mode and pivot.”

Nor is he upbeat these days about the restaurant business. “The food business, it seems like it’s getting worse and worse by the day. I can’t figure it out,” says Valente, the son of restaurant-owning Italian immigrants who himself has run a small empire of Italian restaurants in Ottawa since the early 1990s, most notably the Fratelli restaurants with his late brother, Robert.

Valente was able to move the coffee business last fall to a location in Stittsville that was cheaper by more than half. Now it makes a better go of things, in part because it shares space with Holey Confections, a gourmet doughnut business.

Valente applied for his cannabis permit about six months before the pandemic began, but had to be patient for the paperwork to come through. After paying five months of rent at the former coffee shop’s empty location in Kanata, Valente was able to transform it into his first BlueBird Cannabis store.

Compared to the coffee bar, the pot shop is “a more high-volume business. It’s an extremely busy store,” Valente says. Pursuing a suburban strategy, he has opened two more BlueBird locations, preferring to build his own brand rather than open a pot-shop franchise.

One of the new BlueBirds is on March Road in Kanata in a building where Farinella, the Little Italy pizzeria, just opened its second location.

Valente says he has seen an immediate synergy between the pot shop and the pizza place upstairs. “Pizza and cannabis, it’s kind of a good marriage,” he says.

“When I reflect on it, how much we dipped into our savings, it’s actually crazy,” Valente says of what it took to start his chain of cannabis stores. “But I’m so happy I did. Now I’ve got a thriving business.”

phum@postmedia.com

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/some-...-food-business
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