Burnstown’s Neat Coffee Shop reopens March 19 with new owners TIFFANY LEPACK tlepack@metroland.com
How sweet it is, Neat is back! Burnstown’s Neat Coffee Shop is set to reopen this weekend, with three new co-owners who have been friends since they were kids. They have the energy, focus and determination to make the 19th century schoolhouse a successful concert venue again. The coffee shop, bakery and 94seat concert venue closed in October 2015 after eight years of bringing in well-known musical acts, after former owner Adam McKinty had some personal financial issues. In early 2015, Arnprior-raised Mark Enright moved into the house behind the Neat and was disappointed when it closed. “The concert hall is second to none, it’s an intimate little venue,” said Enright of watching a number of shows there before it closed. “It’s like artists coming into your living room.” Enright calls the reopening on March 19, set as a ‘soft’ opening, an adventure a year in the making. “We are definitely excited,” said Enright. “It’s definitely a journey. We are all high-tech guys and we didn’t have restaurant experience, but we love music.”
Tiffany Lepack/Metroland
Scot Wilson, Mark Enright and Billy Virgin are the new co-owners of Burnstown’s Neat Coffee Shop. The Sunday night show will feature folk-rockers Slambovian Circus of Dreams and will include dinner and the show. They are working toward opening the café, bakery and restaurant in April. In the kitchen will be local cook Dawn Smith from White Lake who used to work at the Blackbird Café in
Burnstown. On March 25 is Joey Landreth, and April 7 they will welcome David Gogo for an acoustic solo performance. “If you are a music fan in general, your jaw will drop after the experience,” Enright promised. “It’s spine-tingling, it had that aura, it was just electric and we’ll pull that off.”
A week before the first show he knows there’s lots still to do but is staying positive. “We will make it the best experience and we will grow from there.” Team work His partners and friends Billy Virgin and Scot Wilson needed some convincing before joining. “Scot is an awesome cook and Bill
loves to fix things,” said Enright. “I started bugging Scot, you can cook and I can run the restaurant. I could never do it alone.” In the summer of 2016, Virgin got interested. In September they made their first big move. “Bill and I put an offer on the building, and the bank slapped us silly, we got beat up,” said Enright. They told Wilson what they were up to and he soon got involved. Things took another turn when another friend told them about the Business Development Canada program, and they set out to present their plans. “It makes sense. It helps businesses to start up or get more working capital,” said Enright. “They helped us finance the building and we got rolling … the rest is history.” That was mid-November. They closed at the end of January and set an ambitious opening for March 19. They didn’t have to do any major renovations but admit they had to do a ton of cleaning, and brought in equipment. The main concert hall was made of chip board, and they have put down pine floor from Gillies. Their masterpiece, where they will serve local craft beer, is the copper patinaed bar, which they spent over 500 hours working on. See SUPPORT, page 11
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