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Fire Puts Habit Lounge Out

As noted in the Tablespotting forum this afternoon, there is some very unfortunate news from Habit Lounge. They’d just finished building a new menu (together with Flying Tiger chef Tina Fineza) and were about to publicly announce it, but then this:

Last week we unveiled our new menu and cocktail list, with the aim of doing an official launch today, Monday December 8. Unfortunately all that remains of our kitchen is some melted spice jars and some very well bbq’d meats, after an early morning fire Sunday.

While the structure of the building survived, Habit sustained severe smoke damage, with the first estimates being that we will be down for at least the next few months.

Bummer!

So, with our new menu now on the back-burner, so to speak, we’re left with a huge cleanup – not exactly how we’d planned to spend our holidays! Thankfully our next door Cascade Room escaped any damage and has already been put to good use to drown some of our sorrows.

I just got off the phone with co-owner Robert Edmonds. No one was hurt, thank goodness. According to the fire department, the fire started in a kitchen garbage can in the wee hours. Co-owner Nigel Pike got a call at 6:30am and found the place filled with black smoke. All that lovely orange covered in black soot! Though it just happened yesterday, they’re already making moves to accommodate staff next door at The Cascade.

I hope some sort of benefit for them can be managed on the fly. It’s a particularly bad time for this to happen with Christmas around the corner…

There are 3 comments

  1. This is terrible, I love Habit. At least Cascade was not affected and no one was hurt.

  2. This is heartbreaking. Habit was/is an excellent restaurant, their new menu was fantastic and the vibe of the place was crisp, clean yet warm. I hope they, and their hard-working staff, will be back on their feet and serving up that delicious poutine and those fantastic bento-style cocktails in no time.

  3. This is terrible! I was just @ Habit the other night and Tina brought us some amazing vegan smoked split pea soup off the new menu. I hope they had the right coverage and will be able to recreate the restaurant soon.