Charlottetown sees flurry of new restaurant openings

Like spring flowers, new restaurants are opening up all around Charlottetown.

Richard Court, operator of Pilot House, is opening up a new seafood restaurant called Sea Rocket in the old Anne of Green Gables store on Victoria Row. He describes all the new openings as pent-up demand — from restaurateurs, not from customers.

"We had a couple of years of nothing opening. Many people had plans and didn't get to them," Court told Island Morning's Wayne Thibodeau.

"With everything opening up and people realizing they've survived the pandemic they're like, let's do something new. Let's put those projects back in play."

P.E.I. restaurants have fared relatively well during the pandemic.

According to Statistics Canada, the province's 17.3 per cent drop in restaurant revenues was one of the lowest in the country, and well below the Canadian average of 25.5 per cent. While restaurants were open they did well overall, with a 5.5 per cent profit margin, scarcely changed from 2019 and the highest in the country.

Most provinces had profits below three per cent in 2020. P.E.I. restaurants had higher profits than those in any other province from 2016 to 2020.

That seems to have Island restaurateurs bullish about the future.

Brett Hogan, operator of Hopyard on Kent Street, just opened the Italian eatery Abbiocco across the street.

Kent Street has seen a lot of new openings since Hopyard launched in 2016 — Upstreet has a location there, and the new Arts Hotel has a couple of venues — and Hogan said that's a good thing.

"We don't look at it as competition at all, the new people that are coming into Kent Street," he said.

"We welcome it, and we want to make it more of a destination."

But the pandemic is still presenting challenges.

Primarily it's about staffing, and that's not entirely a new problem, said Anuj Thapa, who operates Himalayan off University Avenue