Restaurant king deep-fries PM’s performance
Valentine’s Day is like the Super Bowl for restaurants.
But with no indoor dining this year, it will be closer to a pre-season scrimmage, during which skeletal staff will whip up takeout orders inside any eateries that miraculously remain open.
No candlelit tables and no light at the end of the tunnel for a battered industry.
My memories of going out are getting fuzzy. I seem to recall a pre-pandemic time when I’d frequent a Charles Khabouth joint so often — Patria, La Société, Sofia, Byblos, KOST — it would have been easier if he had just garnished my wages.
But when Charles calls me on Thursday, mostly just to catch up, those fuzzy memories turn into fears as he peers into the future.
When the masks eventually come off and the Purell dries, the hospitality guru says it’s entirely possible 40 per cent of our restaurants will already be gone.
“Right now, when you drive down the street, you don’t know who’s open and who’s closed,” he says. “Everybody is closed. But when they reopen the city, and some doors never open again, then you will say, ‘Holy s--t, they’re gone.’ And they’re gone. Oh my God, they’re not reopening.”
The lockdown has put all of us in a headlock. But for restaurateurs, it’s more of a chokehold. Khabouth has laid off about 2,400 employees, more than 90 per cent of the workforce at INK Entertainment, the company he founded 37 years ago.
His headquarters on Bloor is all but shuttered. Instead, he and six lieutenants now work out of the Mister C. lounge in the lobby of Bisha, his hotel and residence on Blue Jays Way. When the pandemic hit, he did not hesitate to shut everything down and follow orders.
But he is increasingly exasperated by what he believes is a government failure to get the balance right between public safety and an economy in shambles.
Why were long-term-care homes — ground zero for the majority of deaths — in no better position during the second wave? Why aren’t we paying heed to the emotional toll of lockdowns? One recent survey, he notes, found the pandemic has damaged the mental health of 76 per cent of Canadians. And most of all, why is the vaccine rollout so slow we are now wondering if we’ll get the jab before we die of old age?
“We are the only G7 country that doesn’t have the vaccine,” says Khabouth. “Israel in a month and a half will be fully vaccinated. The U.S. is giving the vaccine to 1.5 million people a day.”
In fact, 11 of his Canadian friends have got the shots … in Florida.
It’s definitely unsettling to learn Canada has dropped to 40th place in vaccination rates per 100 people, or that, in total, we have vaccinated fewer people to date than America did yesterday. In the race for herd immunity, are we really behind Malta, Chile, Estonia, Romania, Seychelles and Lithuania?
Khabouth is quick to say he does not want to assign blame. But when I ask if he would ever hire Justin Trudeau after the PM’s pandemic response, he does not hold back.
“One million per cent ‘no,’ ” he replies. “Listen, he’s a drama teacher. The only thing that got him in office is his name. What has he done before that to prove that he would be a good leader for a country, never mind a company, an office, a city. But a country. The guy went from being a schoolteacher to the prime minister of a country. How does that make sense?”
Khabouth is incredulous at our vaccine snafus and what feels like bureaucratic inertia.
Where is the sense of urgency? Where is the planning and transparency?
“(Trudeau) didn’t do the right deals. It’s not Uber Eats. This is a vaccine that saves lives.”
For all the early euphoria about how Canada had secured the most doses per capita, in reality so far, we are frozen in a holding pattern of delayed shipments, distribution bottlenecks, confusion between Ottawa and the provinces, and third-class status in the global priority chain.
I’m tempted to smuggle my elderly parents into Bahrain and bribe anyone with a syringe.
Khabouth wishes Trudeau had hired a CEO of a big corporation to negotiate more ruthlessly: “Pfizer or AstraZeneca, they are businesses. They are not the Virgin Mary. They are not Mother Teresa. They are businesses and you have to deal with them on a business level.”
I ask Khabouth what he wants for Valentine’s Day from all levels of government.
From John Tory: “Reopen the city, with limitations, of course.”
From Doug Ford: “Better subsidy programs.”
From Justin Trudeau: “It’s all about the vaccine. I don’t want money. I just want to open.”
Over nearly four decades, Khabouth has turned his company into a juggernaut with clubs, festivals, hotels and a suite of swish restaurants on both sides of the border. The vertically integrated INK Entertainment will survive months of red ink, even if Khabouth is now millions in debt and has to rebuild a workforce that took years to carefully hire, train and jell as a seamless unit.
But what about the smaller or family-run restaurants that, even in the best of times, operate with the thinnest of margins? How much more can they endure? Khabouth is struck by the differences between Toronto and Miami, where he has three properties: “If you land there, other than seeing the odd person in a mask, you wouldn’t know it’s a pandemic.”
He does not agree with Florida’s Wild West policy and points to the state’s high infection rates: “I’m not for just opening and being a cowboy. But in life, there is a happy medium.”
In the limited time his Toronto restaurants were open during the pandemic, Khabouth spent more than $100,000 on PPE, acrylic dividers, ventilation and reconfigured seating to abide by physical distancing. He had systems in place for contact tracing. He hired companies to deep clean surfaces, sometimes on the hour. So how many cases were linked to his restaurants?
“Zero,” he says. “Not one single infection came from indoor dining.”
There are no easy solutions right now. But recalibrating the balance between public health and the financial health of an entire industry on the brink does not seem unreasonable.
Valentine’s Day is a good time to remember how much we love and miss our restaurants.