I’m happy to be here on behalf of Centennial College and the School of Hospitality, Tourism and Culinary Arts – specifically of course you know being in the business of teaching and leading students to enter careers in this industry.
Obviously it’s a very challenging time and we want to make sure that we’re involved in supporting local restaurants as much as we can – not just through COVID obviously this has put extra pressure on – but beyond that.
First of all I just want to say thank you to Susan for the shout out for the local cafe and restaurant in the chat. I manage that restaurant as part of my role at the college and it’s a training restaurant. With students moving programs online we are closed right now. We’d love for you to come visit us. Hopefully that will change as things move along this year and we get some vaccines out and get students back on campus.
What I would really like to talk about today is a partnership that we are part of with UTSC’s The Bridge and the City of Toronto. We’re putting together a hub for people in the Scarborough community or visitors and tourists to the Scarborough community to be able to find options if they want to support local independent restaurants.
We’ve worked together over the last few months but we’re really just starting to get into this. We’re now able to communicate a little bit more clearly with restaurants what we’re doing to support them and get some information out to consumers. We’re hoping to actually have the landing page for this site launched hopefully today so restaurants can go and connect.
I’m going to share my screen so there’s a little bit of information for you to see. Hopefully you can see this clearly yeah we could see it’s amazing. I just kind of want to give a bit of an overview of what this find dining program is. So we’re launching a website called finedining.ca that will be a hub for visitors or residents of Scarborough to find options for dining in Scarborough that are local and independently owne.
It’ a really great initiative that fits really well into what’s going on with COVID right now. We’ve seen a lot of community groups and a lot of supporters as we want to see these local restaurants do well.
I know Chef Suman you already mentioned so many are strugglingand we’re not going to see come out on the other side of this. We want to do our part to stop that and you mentioned profit margins in the restaurant industry are quite low and that’s most of the time.
That’s not what restaurateurs are in this for – it’s a passion project. It’s what they do because they love it and it’s such an important part of any community. It’s part of the social fabric of any community that we’re missing and Scarborough has so much to celebrate. This website will really focus on celebrating the diversityand the stories of these restaurants, putting that in the forefront so that there’s a personal connection. You will get to know you know the struggles, the successes and the faces of the owners.
All of that information helps consumers and in making decisions especially right now and so I think we’re really happy to be able to help put that together. We’ve had teams of students that were working on it. Bill has had students working on research back in the summer for this project and we’ve had co-op students and interns and class students working on developing this website and reaching out to restaurants.
Any restaurants that are on this call right now we’d love to connect with you as well. I’ll leave some information in the chat on how to contact us if you’re interested in joining this page so we can build you a profile and get your information out there for any consumers as well as to connect sign up for updates.
We are looking to officially launch in the spring and be able to really connect the community so that there’s a one space for people to be able to go. I want to support or discover a restaurant. I want to find something new that I haven’t tried beyond my normal go-to places in Scarborough. I’m looking for a different type of cuisine.
We’ll try to make it really easy for you to find restaurants and to help support them.