Bloomfield market

Restaurant finds new purpose as village grocery store

The building at 257 Main Street in Bloomfield has come full circle. Known as Judy’s Grocery Store when it was built in 1949, it subsequently became a branch of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce before it was completely renovated by new owners Laura Borutski and Elliot Reynolds as the Bloomfield Public House Restaurant. The restaurant opened in the fall of 2018 and had a very successful year in 2019. It was looking as though 2020 would build on that success. “We were setting up, getting ready for a typical tourist season and for our second full summer. We had our new patio and we were really looking forward to showing it off,” said Chef Reynolds. Then the COVID-19 pandemic descended and the Ontario government decreed that all restaurants would be closed, offering takeout service only. “We took a little break for a week or two and we had some big talks about what we should be doing, and we found it an opportune time to do updates to the restaurant that would be difficult to do while we were open, like re-staining the floor or doing touch-up paintwork,” said Reynolds. As the weeks of closure mounted, Reynolds and Borutski decided to do some “comfort food” for takeout—buckets of fried chicken or the restaurant’s signature smokehouse ham. “It was a great way to start things and it was really the only way to have an inflow of any kind of sales,” said Reynolds. “It’s only a couple of days a week, so it wasn’t going to sustain us. It’s a vast difference from where we would normally be at, even at this time of year before the tourist season.”

With no notion of when they would be allowed to properly reopen their restaurant, Borutski and Reynolds considered possible ways forward. “We really didn’t want to be in limbo anymore with what restaurants are able to do, so we decided to push into a market, and it’s something the community really needed, so we’re happy to take that on and make it happen,” said Borutski. This required extensive changes to the interior space as well as new equipment for food storage and display. “It’s been a bit of a wild ride, but we think it’s the right decision,” said Reynolds. “It’s a new hat for us, because we’re not grocery store owners by trade, so there’s going to be a definite learning curve, but we’ve got great people on staff who’ve worked in that setting before. We’re going to really showcase everything that we did in the restaurant, which was to make everything in-house. So there will be some comfort food, a lot of fresh grab-and-go, but it will really be a neighbourhood grocery store and market.” They will continue to use local suppliers such a Blue Wheelbarrow Farms, Pyramid Ferments, County Soda Company, with local meat from Vader Farms and Prinzen Farms. “We’ve transferred to being a retail outlet for them, which is really fun,” added Borutski. The kitchen is still in operation, providing things like duck cassoulet, jerk chicken dinner or carrot curry, all pre-packaged for takeaway. There’s also a wine and beer section.

To pay tribute to the original grocery store, the couple have decided to name the side patio Judy’s Barbeque and Fried Chicken. “It’s kind of a full-circle story, which we think is super interesting,” said Reynolds. “We’ll have a summer kitchen going on the patio. So when Ontario decides to lift the restrictions, we’ll have the grocery store going full time and it will be the best of both worlds.” It also ties in well with the strengths of their restaurant. “Elliot has a stonehouse smoker that we built during the first renovation of the whole property, and smoked meats have always been a very strong sense in what we’ve done from the get-go, and we wanted to add on to that by doing more of a casual style approach in our summer kitchen patio,” said Borutski. “We’re really inspired by this change, and we’re able to bring back our staff, which is really important to us, and to give them more of a stability for employment. We can open up, get people inside the doors, and get people back.”