Don’t forget businesses marooned on Victoria Street

Arabesque is a Middle Eastern restaurant with a loyal following.

In the view of many of its customers, no other place in town makes better hummus. And that freshly baked, sweet-smelling pita bread is in a class of its own.

But Arabesque is on Victoria Street North.

In a sense, it has just lost its oxygen supply.

The Victoria Street bridge over the Conestoga Parkway closed to traffic last week, so that it can be demolished and rebuilt for the new Highway 7 to Guelph. That has cut off an important arterial road that brought people to and from this thriving commercial strip.

You can still access this part of Victoria Street, but it will involve a detour along Frederick Street to River Road, or Wellington to Lackner, and then doubling back.

These routes will take longer, no question. Not only are they less direct, but they will also be clogged with traffic. And time is what everyone is short of these days.

Arabesque co-owner Mamoun Yanes said that since the bridge closed, dinner business has declined by about 10 per cent and the lunch traffic has fallen by about 30 per cent. It’s lunch that concerns him most, because that’s where Arabesque does most of its business. Yanes knows people have limited time at lunch. So if the trip to and from the restaurant takes an extra 15 minutes, he’s concerned customers will go elsewhere. The bridge is scheduled to be closed for 10 long months. It isn’t scheduled to open until November.

Owners of businesses that were trapped behind construction for light rail transit in central Kitchener and Waterloo know what that means. You have to work very hard to keep your customers. Sometimes, no matter what you do, they don’t come in. Yanes says he is optimistic that Arabesque will prevail. “Hours for staff maybe will be affected, if we have less business,” he said.

But he has “self-confidence” that the quality of the food that’s served there will keep enough customers coming. “This is our food,” he said. “We can feel it.”

Yanes and the other two owners were born and raised in Syria, of Palestinian parents. He was a trained engineer when he immigrated to Canada in 2009. But he found it was going to take a lot of time for him to get Canadian credentials. So he decided to open the restaurant, which allowed his wife to continue her graduate studies. She has almost completed her PhD in global governance, and she teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University. Yanes and his partners didn’t know much about restaurants, but “we learned by doing,” he said.

Do we need a brand-new highway to Guelph? Of course we do. We’ve lobbied for it not only for years, but for decades. We’re told it will be worth it to suffer through the construction, because the new highway will be so much quicker and safer when it’s done. No pain, no gain, as they say. That may be true for the big picture, but it’s important to remember that if the past has anything to teach us, some of the individual businesses along that strip won’t make it, unless we customers make a deliberate effort to support them. Many of these places are owned by families who have poured everything they have into their print shop, their health-food store, their restaurant. It’s not just a transaction with the customer. It’s a relationship. If we want these places to be there for us after the new bridge reopens, we have to consider something more than our own convenience.