Restaurateur charts new course.
Popular Sydney eatery will soon offer design your own pasta dishes
SYDNEY — Dillan MacNeil hasn’t been a restaurateur long enough to worry about how things were done back in the day.
But that’s not from a lack of experience. The 25-year-old began displaying his entrepreneurial acumen when he was a kid making homemade sweets and treats that the former owners of the Wentworth Perk coffee shop, located a stone’s throw from his family’s Sydney home, would sell at the counter of the popular George Street eatery.
Fast forward to 2021. MacNeil now owns the coffeehouse that he renamed Dillan’s at Wentworth after purchasing it three years ago. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, business at the popular café drastically dropped off due to lockdowns and travel restrictions.
But the young entrepreneur did not panic. Instead, he opened a second establishment, Dillan’s on Townsend, to take advantage of the emerging, and suddenly necessary, takeout food business.
“We’re lucky we’re still in business,” mused the affable MacNeil. “We opened our other store (Dillan’s on Townsend) right in the middle of the pandemic. We focused on takeaway over there because business wasn’t great here as we rely a lot on the traffic we get in the peak summertime from visitors and from tourists.”
Nova Scotia is now in the midst of reopening after the latest province-wide lockdown that began in late April. That’s good news for the hospitality industry, but it doesn’t guarantee that restaurants will immediately enjoy the same level of patronage that they did pre-pandemic.
“Maybe in another year’s time everybody will be vaccinated, maybe the boats will start coming again and we’ll have that vibe again,” said MacNeil. “But to continue on this way, especially for the rest of the summer, we don’t know what’s going to happen, nobody does, so we’re just going to try to keep going. We have to adapt with the times. People are shifting and are getting more used to eating at home. They still want restaurant food but some people are still scared of the virus.”
ADAPTATION
MacNeil reluctantly acknowledges that business at his flagship establishment is not likely to return to pre-COVID-19 levels for some time, especially given the travel restrictions that have shut down the cruise ship industry and limited the number of off-island visitors travelling to Cape Breton.
Heavily reliant on the tourist trade, the restaurateur whose first name is now becoming an identifiable local brand has come up with another plan to keep his business alive. MacNeil is informally calling his new initiative a “pasta pop-up.”
He’s aiming to re-open Dillan’s at Wentworth by Canada Day armed with not only a new menu but a new approach to doing business during a pandemic.
“Dillan’s at Wentworth is not really set up to do well in the takeaway game, so we realized you have to adapt to change,” explained MacNeil, who has been working with his culinary team on a number of new pasta-based recipes that will be on offer when the restaurant re-opens. “It’s all about creating your own pasta experience. We’re going to do hand-rolled pasta, probably pappardelle which is the thicker-cut long noodle, and we’ll have all homemade sauces, lots of toppings, lots of choices, lot of different options.
“We want to make it affordable with prices starting at $11. This is all good grade stuff, nothing microwaved. I’ve always wanted to have a place where someone could come in a have a really good meal and good experience for under $20.”
NOTHING VENTURED, NOTHING GAINED
MacNeil said he has spent countless hours preparing for the restaurant’s new direction.
“It’s moving forward but it’s a bit scary — we’ve tried so many different flours, different eggs and different tomatoes and little more of this, a little less of that, you have to think of the palates of the customers,” he said. “This was a breakfast/pastry café for the better part of 15 years, so it’s known for that and I think some folks are going to be a bit shocked. But we have to shift in a way that is good for our business, good for our customers and good for our employees.
“We employ almost a dozen people, we’re going to go with that for now and if there is demand to completely open the dining room and resume breakfast, well, we’d love to that but for now we’re going to start small with this little idea and see how it grows. We’re going to run it for two or three months and see how it goes. Then we could make it a permanent thing, we could switch gears and go back or we could move forward with something else.”
On the positive side of things, MacNeil is already well adapted to change. After all, he made his first foray into the restaurant scene in 2016 when at the age of 20 he and a partner opened Joe Hollywood’s Gourmet Take-Away in Whitney Pier. He moved on from that venture but remained working in the hospitality industry until he and a number of investors, mostly family members, took over the former Wentworth Perk.
“Things are different now. One of my aunts, one of our investors, ran restaurants for 30 years and I know she had some trouble adjusting from a bustling dining room to a takeaway service,” he said. “There’s been a lot of uncertainty over the past year and a half and it’s still out there. All we can do is stick with it and adapt to the circumstances as they change.”
Meanwhile, MacNeil said he is also working on a cookbook that when completed will feature more than 150 recipes inspired by what has worked thus far in his restaurant career.