Rural Manitoba restaurant owner wants changes to household dining restrictions

Wanting changes to dining restrictions A restaurant owner in rural Manitoba is calling for changes to dining restrictions.

WINNIPEG — A restaurant owner in rural Manitoba wants changes to the province’s dining restrictions.

Under the province’s current set of public health orders, restaurants are permitted to open, but only at 25 per cent capacity. The rules also require groups of visitors to be from the same household.

Kahleigh Dubois, who owns Kahleigh’s Brew Barn in Riverton, Man., said she’d like to see the household restrictions lifted.

She said this is because she doesn’t have all the same resources to reach customers as restaurants in cities may have.

“We’ve been doing delivery just to try and increase our sales, but of course our area isn’t that big and we don’t have the option of Skip or Uber Eats or anything like that, so that’s an additional person that we’ve had to bring on,” she said.

Dubois said it’s a struggle to reach customers outside of the town limits without these types of delivery services.

“We have been lucky though that Riverton has actually taken off on the ice fishing parks, so we do have lots of customers coming from all over Manitoba in that way and they’ve kept us really busy, so that is good,” she said.

“But these new restrictions in place, we still have had the opportunity to have lots of customers to keep us busy.”

Last week, the province’s proposed a new set of restrictions, which would come into effect in March. Under these new rules, restaurants could increase their capacity to 50 per cent, however the household rule remains in place.