Grunt restaurant

This evening I was alerted to what is apparently a forced shut-down and eviction of popular restaurant Grunt in Mechanicsville. The Ottawa Citizen article is here.

Jason and Marie have created something special at the corner of Hinchey and Lyndale, and I don't need to repeat the contributions they've made to the neighbourhood and City.

Tonight, we have no more information than is in the Citizen article. That information is relatively superficial but I've been reached out to tonight by community leaders who are concerned by what they've read.

My strong encouragement to the the landlord and to the restaurant owners is to ensure they take every step to put their relationship back on a solid footing.

Mechanicsville is better with Grunt a part of it.

Relationships between landlords and tenants are outside the City's purview. That said, earlier this spring I asked commercial landlords in our ward's BIA areas to join me for an information-sharing session in the context of the pandemic. I used that opportunity to ask landlords to be as lenient and understanding as possible with tenants in everyone's best interest, and to take full advantage of the significant help offered by various levels of government. It will be ultimately less costly to keep good tenants and to minimize shopper-discouraging vacancies than to focus on short-term priorities. We have been fortunate in the ward that generally every effort has been made to keep our great local businesses and to stay poised for the recovery that will come.

I do not know the full nature of the relationship between Grunt and their landlord, but if those parties want to avail themselves of any help my office can provide to re-visit the current situation, my door is open. 

I'll conclude by repeating myself. Mechanicsville is better with Grunt a part of it. Its loss for whatever reason would be a disappointing loss to our ward.