Another downtown St. John's restaurant is closing — and the owners say it likely won't be the last
7 downtown St. John's restaurants have closed in as many months
After three years of operating out of the kitchen at Bannerman Brewing Co., Namjim owners Ian Brown and Gabe Roberge are moving on. But their attempts to find their own brick-and-mortar home for their Thai-inspired food haven't come to fruition.
"We kind of realized that it wasn't really us that couldn't make it work. It was kind of just this business model in this climate that didn't work," Brown said in an interview with The St. John's Morning Show.
Brown started Namjim after moving back to St. John's during the pandemic. He had fallen in love with Thai cuisine while living in Thailand, and when he moved home, he saw a gap in the market.
So he started creating Thai dishes, "but using kind of the quintessential Newfoundland flora and fauna," he said.
Dishes like lobster pad thai, curry with Newfoundland mussels, or mushroom rice with local chanterelles.
For a year, Brown and Roberge bounced around kitchens in St. John's and beyond, doing regular pop-ups at restaurants and bars. In November 2021, they moved into the kitchen at Bannerman Brewing Co. in downtown St. John's full time.
In December, though, Brown and Roberge announced they were moving out of Bannerman — but Brown said it isn't because they ran out of money or any relationships have soured.
"There's been a lot of inflation in the past couple of years. Margins get squeezed. And, you know, I guess what made sense financially for Bannerman a couple of years ago wasn't necessarily true today," he said.
They began looking for their own place, but Roberge said there's a variety of reasons why they couldn't make things work, and most of them are related to the cost of rent and building upgrades.
"If the project goes overtime a little bit or over budget a little bit or you have a slow month, there's no room there for anything other than, like, absolute success all the time," Brown said.
7 restaurants close in 7 months
Brown and Roberge plan to continue catering, even though they won't be operating a physical restaurant — at least for now — after they leave Bannerman on Feb. 10. But Namjim is far from the first restaurant in downtown St. John's to close in recent months.
Gahan House, Pi, Bad Bones Ramen, the Nook and Cannery, Brewdock and Chinched — all in or near the downtown area — have closed since August. Other downtown businesses have closed too, like the Newfoundland Weavery and Pinpoint Ink.
AnnMarie Boudreau, the CEO of the St. John's Board of Trade, said they're worried about the trend.
"The reality is that a lot of restaurants and small businesses haven't really recovered from the pandemic yet," she said.
She pointed to rising business costs, changes in consumer habits and lower disposable income as some of the main challenges businesses are dealing with.
"There has been a bit of a perfect storm over the last couple of years," she said.
St. John's isn't the only place where restaurants are struggling. According to Restaurants Canada, restaurant bankruptcies across the country increased by 45 per cent in the first eight months of 2024, compared with the same period in 2023.
And Roberge believes the situation in St. John's could get worse.
"I'm sure there's going to be more," he said. "We're going into the scariest part of the year now: January, February."
City focused on investment, safety, residential development
Roberge believes the city could do more to revive downtown.
"It's boarded-up places, closed businesses, empty restaurants, and they're all just like sitting there ready to go, but just untouched," he said.
He wants to see more support for small downtown businesses and a vacancy tax on properties that sit empty.
St. John's Mayor Danny Breen agrees the downtown core needs help.
"We really need to see an injection into the downtown. We need to see some of the properties that are there redeveloped because they're not in the condition that they need to be in for a vibrant downtown," he said.
Breen said the city isn't considering a vacancy tax, but he believes they should be more aggressive about encouraging investment and development downtown — including more residential units.
"We need to get more people living in the downtown now. And with that will come that level of traffic," he said.
He said the city is also considering ways to respond to concerns about public safety and cleanliness in the downtown area. The city has been holding a public consultation on a downtown neighbourhood plan, set to be released later this year.
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