Member Profile-Blue Dog

The Blue Dog in A New World

We bought The Blue Dog on May 30th of 2019. A staple of Brant Ave., known for their delicious food and drinks and as a meeting place for the community. Seeking to build upon that solid foundation we began introducing our own flavour little by little. Slowly but surely, it began…a game night here, a trivia night there, a few local musicians filling our space with magic. We setup our game library and ran events in an effort to build up the patronage and spread the word. It started to happen. Our trivia nights were at capacity, our game nights and live music nights were picking up steam. Things were looking up!

Due to the pandemic, we closed the cafe on March 17th of 2020. Take-out only wasn’t sustainable for us so we decided to reexamine our business. We used the time to repaint (something we never could have been able to do otherwise) and built our online shop. Being the only employee left, it created a massive learning curve as I transitioned from learning our new cafe business to learning the world of E-commerce.

We expanded our retail and provided free local delivery. With indoor dining on the way back we opened our doors again on June 15th. I took my place at the counter for the first time.

As a new business owner, I hadn’t had the time to get into the day-to-day operations of being personally involved with our customers. Now that things had slowed and staff was at a minimum, I was able to throw myself into the real thick of it, which felt good.