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Agreed that the restaurant in the Fed should have gone ahead... with a cafe/bar as planned. Alas.

It was to have had an upscale spot on the main floor in the SWC, but the bar/cafe coming down the small stairs at the south end of the main into the grand foyer with outdoor patio in that treed area.
 
Install an upscale cafe/pub in the east end of the Haultain Building, which is currently under renovations.
 
The Fed is already set up to receive it and is a better location for visibility, events, catering and views.
 
Agreed that the restaurant in the Fed should have gone ahead... with a cafe/bar as planned. Alas.

It was to have had an upscale spot on the main floor in the SWC, but the bar/cafe coming down the small stairs at the south end of the main into the grand foyer with outdoor patio in that treed area.
I heard a bit about that during my time at the Leg. Timmies apparently came closest to opening, but that fell through due to the pandemic. It turns out however, that the cafe space needs capital investment before it can accommodate actual cooking. I believe the issue is that it doesn't have the sort of ventilation needed to allow cooking. When a cafe did open there, it was run as a satellite operation of the law court cafeteria; they'd cook the hot food at the ELC kitchen then drive it over for the day. If it went well, then money would get put into the renovation needed for proper ventilation so that everything could be done in-house. Sadly, I guess it was a money pit instead and it shut down. Personally, I think their biggest mistake was catering to the internal GOA/LAO crowd. In order to allow Timmies to operate outside of building hours, the Fed building got renovated to add exterior doors that were completely walled off from the rest of the lobby. The recent cafe did not take advantage of this, and had very poor hours; when I did tours on Saturdays, I couldn't even refer visitors there when they were hungry because the cafe was only open on week days.

I looked through a few different plans and documents just now, since I'm with the GoA, but none of them mention the cafe doubling as a bar. It is interesting to see that they originally intended for a restaurant and a cafe to exist in the main floor at the same time though. It looks like they retained the roughed-in mechanical services and exhaust duct for that restaurant space so it could still become a restaurant in the future, but even pre-pandemic there just wasn't much interest among private operators in having a restaurant there.
 

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