By Charlotte Wooldridge | posted on July 16, 2020
AFTER an uncertain four months, Mount Barker’s hotel has finally reopened, with new owners launching the bar and bistro a fortnight ago.
Owner and operator of Mount Barker Bar and Bistro Bec Drage said she could have had no idea when purchasing the business in November last year that the reopening would be so delayed.
“We were supposed to open at the end of February and that never happened because of COVID, so we held off and then everything shut down,” she said.
“We were pretty concerned we wouldn’t be able to open at all.”
Like many other businesses, Ms Drage said the Mount Barker Bar and Bistro just wasn’t viable to partially open under the State’s COVID-19 restrictions.
However, since opening their doors on July 1, Ms Drage said the community has truly gotten behind the new venture.
“We’ve got a lot of support from the locals and they’re happy to see it open again,” she said.
“Everybody was pretty excited when they found out we would be taking it over but then we had problems with the liquor licence and then coronavirus, so finally after seven months we’ve been able to open.”
Ms Drage said despite the stresses of owning a new business through the pandemic, she was grateful that they have eventually been able to get people through the doors.
“With coronavirus, there’s a lot of businesses that weren’t able to reopen or open altogether, so it was a real ‘good on ya’ sort of thing from the community for managing to do it,” she said.
