Not much to celebrate in banquet halls
Owners, used to hosting baby showers, weddings, funerals, call for aid
Before COVID-19, Scarborough’s Grand Cinnamon Banquet and Convention Centre was a busy venue, hosting weddings that reached its 1,300person capacity.
Each night after guests went home, cleaners, dishwashers and decorators got to work, preparing the hall for the next day’s event.
No longer.
Locked down since March, the Morningside Heights-area banquet hall didn’t reopen until late summer, and only for parties of up to 50 people.
Now, wedding season is over and owner Ruwan Jayakody is five months and $250,000 behind on the property taxes.
“This has become a nightmare here,” Jayakody said. “I need $250,000 to keep the place closed.”
As the novel coronavirus forms its second wave, banquet halls, big and small, are nearing states of financial collapse.
Health experts are calling on the province to tighten rules immediately for all “non-essential businesses and activities that facilitate social gatherings.
Meanwhile, these hall owners say they are following cleaning and safety protocols — Toronto Public Health said on Monday it was not aware of any COVID-19 cases associated with banquet halls — and need financial assistance from the government to survive.
Jayakody said his staff are “super careful” about weddings — there were 30 at Grand Cinnamon in August — religious ceremonies followed by food service in which a single person serves guests from behind a screen.
“It’s like a meeting, like in a school. We feed them in the next room,” he said. “If somebody puts (on) music, we pull out the wire.”
Some venues are neighbourhood hubs for everything from baby showers to funerals.
The White Shields Banquet Halls, with its 900-person total capacity, has been on Lawrence Avenue for 50 years.
One customer got married at White Shields and his grandchild wants to hold his engagement party there, said the owner, known by his family name, Thananjan, or simply T.
But while patient suppliers help to keep things going, Thananjan said he can’t pay rent and has a hard time paying water, natural gas and other fixed costs.
“At 50 people (for a wedding,) I’m making nothing, zero,” he said, adding though Flipper’s Fish House — part of the same business — still has regular customers, that’s a tiny percentage of what the halls make normally.
Qssis Banquet Halls, at Markham and Kingston roads for three decades, once fed hundreds of families for free each Christmas.
“We have no business whatsoever,” said manager Mark Jagnarine.
“We have functions (booked), but everybody’s scared. People are cancelling, cancelling, cancelling.”
Turning on heat and Hydro for 20 or 50 people doesn’t make sense, said Jagnarine, who’s written to Premier Doug Ford, asking for help to get through the pandemic.
“I tweeted him, I email him. Nobody cares,” Jagnarine added.
“We’re all alone.” Representatives from a score of larger venues met in Vaughan last week to form the Canadian Event Venue Association. They hope to convince governments to cover their mounting bills.
The industry has been “economically destroyed” this year and will struggle to climb out of a deep hole, said Sam D’Uva, owner of Dynamic Hospitality and Entertainment, which operates Scarborough’s Guild Inn Estates that hosted “microweddings” in August.
With the traditionally slow winter season coming, “we’ve really lost an entire fiscal year,” said D’Uva.
“At some point in time, you run out of cash.”
On Sept. 24, 38 specialist physicians, including three affiliated with Scarborough Health Network, called on Ontario to tighten rules immediately for all “non-essential businesses and activities that facilitate social gatherings and increase opportunities for exposure.”
D’Uva said weddings where people contracted the virus around Toronto were “backyard weddings, where there’s no control.”
A spokesperson for Mayor John Tory, said this week that the city offered all businesses a 60-day property tax deferral early in the pandemic and “will continue to advocate for the provincial and federal governments to provide support to businesses — like banquet halls and restaurants — impacted by public health measures.”
Jayakody wants Tory to continue deferring property taxes until he and other venue owners can pay.
“The government should support us. They have to support us,” Jayakody said.
“Save the places, at least; save the people.”