INNISFAIL – The Coffee Cottage will absolutely not offer dine-in service.
Last week the province shut that down.
But many Alberta business owners immediately vowed to defy the COVID restriction order. Not The Coffee Cottage in Innisfail. It won’t offer it today, and probably not until the pandemic is knocked down for the count and it’s finally safe for everyone to come in.
“Indefinitely,” said Dale Dunham, who co-owns the town’s longstanding restaurant near the corner of Main Street and 49th Avenue with partner Shaun Steen.
It has been almost four months since their restaurant had dine-in service, and that includes the period between Feb. 8 and April 9 when restrictions were relaxed for restaurants to allow patrons inside again.
They’ve lost good money that could have been pocketed if they had opened their doors for dine-in service like everyone else. But it was more important for them to keep them shut. The two men love their community that has embraced them since they purchased The Coffee Cottage last year.
Dunham and Steen believe the COVID-19 pandemic is real and dangerous. They want to keep their community and fellow citizens safe at all costs. With dine-in service for restaurants, pubs, bars, lounges, cafes once again prohibited on April 9 under provincial COVID guidelines, the two men – unlike many other owners across the province – have no intention whatsoever of breaking laws or guidelines.
“We are going to maintain our closure and weather permitting the front patio will be open but until it gets to Step 3 when mixed families can sit together, we are not going to open up because we don’t want to have to police our customers,” said Dunham, whose restaurant also offers take-out. “We don’t want the hassle. We don’t want the headache.
“We want to do our best to keep our staff and community safe,” said Dunham, who’s afflicted with severe asthma but refuses to get an exemption to not wear a mask. “I don’t want an exemption. I can breathe fine. Why would I run the risk of putting myself at risk or other people at risk?”
There were several reasons why he and Steen refused to offer dine-in service during the pandemic when provincial COVID rules said they could, he said.
“The main one was our belief in the strength of the community and its health, and if someone had gotten sick because we did open it would have been a very difficult thing for Shaun and I to deal with,” he said. “If our establishment had been the genesis of another outbreak or a cluster, we would not have felt very good about that.
“We have a lot of elderly clientele who have supported us and still use us for take-out and we just didn’t want to run the risk.”
Dunham noted he has seen the news from all over the world where countries moved away from restrictions and within a few weeks were forced to shut down again as the pandemic was worse then ever.
“With these new variants across the world they’ve had to lock down again, and they were not just putting mild restrictions in place but a full lockdown,” he said, noting the questionable behavior of some Albertans.
“The writing was on the wall. It was going to happen because people were not wearing their masks when they should have been. They were gathering in large numbers. The were doing family events.”
In the meantime, Dunham is as tired and fed up with the pandemic as anybody but his resolve remains strong. Instead of just sitting idle he and his partner have changed their business model.
They have created retail space inside their restaurant for local artisan products to generate revenue to maintain their business viability and to keep their nine employees on the job as long as they can.
“We wanted to support local artisans, and brought in artisan products with the majority from locals and also to provide an additional service,” said Dunham, a big believer of being socially connected to the community no matter what obstacles are in the way.
“It’s about the greater good. It’s not about looking at just our lives, our situation,” he said. “We need to look beyond our own financial situation and our health and what is best for the community."
“We feel what we have done is best for the community,” he concluded.
