“We can’t wait to welcome everyone back” - Calderdale’s pubs and restaurants get ready for the grand re-opening

Pubs and restaurants across the UK closed their doors in March as the coronavirus lockdown was introduced.

But now they are getting ready to open up again, along with hotels, bed and breakfasts and campsites across the area.

And business owners say they are relieved to finally be welcoming back customers after their prolonged shutdown.

Andrew Russell, at The Black Horse Inn, Brighouse, said: “All the safety protocols are pretty much boxed off now.

“We’re not going to be able to open to the same capacity as we were before because we’ve got to shuffle tables about quite a bit.

“It’ll be a limited offering and a limited opening but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

“We’ve been operating a takeaway service during lockdown, a grocery service, and we’ve been doing eat-at-home Sunday lunches, so we’ve been really busy.

“It’s difficult to judge what the demand is going to be. I’ve tried to canvas opinion.

“I think there’s two distinct camps, on the one hand we’ve got people who are very frightened of social integration in public places, who have got used to eating and drinking at home, but on the other hand there are people desperate to get out to a pub and for a meal.

“We just don’t know but we’ll be ready for what comes.

“Our hotel has been kept open for key workers, some of whom have come to sleep during the day or have moved into the area to work, and we have prepared them breakfast in a morning and left it outside their room.

“We’ve already got some of our regular corporate clients asking about availability, but a lot of businesses who send people all around the country have had them home-working, so I suspect there won’t be a great surge of corporate travellers initially.

“The companies they’re working for will say ‘this working from home thing has worked quite well so you don’t need to travel to do a bit of business, you can do it by Zoom or Skype’.

“The one thing we weren’t prepared to do was sit on our hands and do nothing during lockdown. I’m amazed how many pubs have just shut their doors.

“I’ve been selling takeaway beer, doing takeaways, so we’re dead keen to re-open, but we can’t really assess what the new normal is going to look like.

“But we can deal with it and we can adapt to it.”

Joseph Farrar, from the Holdsworth House Hotel in Halifax, said they are planning to re-open on July 10.

“It has been a long 16 weeks since we closed the doors here and we are very much looking forward to being able to welcome back our wonderful guests once again,” he said.

“It won’t exactly be business as normal. We have introduced various new practices and procedures, a lot of which will be behind the scenes but the visible changes for our guests will be the Perspex screens at reception and in our restaurant areas as well as the added hand sanitiser stations that are located around the building.

“For the early stages of our re-opening our restaurant on an evening will only be open for those people staying with us to ensure that we can safely distance all our guests but we will be serving our famous afternoon tea to everyone from July 11 and bookings have already proved immensely popular for this.

“The major difference for us at the moment is the lack of weddings. We have had to rearrange around 50 weddings throughout the last 16 weeks and even though the government have announced that ceremonies for 30 people can take place from July 4 it doesn’t allow for people who have more guests than this to have their special day any time soon.

“We have managed to adjust some weddings and some of our lovely couples have decided to proceed with much smaller numbers just so they can have their special day when they planned, even if it isn’t exactly how they would have imagined.

“We remain positive that things will move in the right direction and that we will be able to adjust our procedures to welcome more people back to Holdsworth House over the upcoming months.”

Sam Davidson, who has owned the Cock of the North Bar in Hipperholme for five years, said: “Our tables are two metres apart, we’ve refurbed and extended our beer garden, added some new tables and cut off half our car park to be more of a beer garden.

“We can comfortably sit 50 to 60 people outside socially distanced, and we’ve moved a couple of tables inside to create a bit of a walkway.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen with people ordering beer - we’re told it’s table service inside but I don’t know how it’s going to work outside.

“We’ve got three doors and seven windows so we have a lot of ventilation, and we can set a one-way system up where they can order from the back from outside.

“We’ve got hand sanitisers on every doorway, signs up, gloves, masks.

“Some people have said they can’t wait to come back but others have said it could be two to three months. It’s surprising, some of the older customers are itching to come in on the first day. I’ve had people texting me saying ‘book me a table for opening’, people in their 70’s with conditions.

“Then there’s people in their 20’s and 30’s saying it’ll be months before they come back. One minute I think we could be absolutely overrun and the next I’m thinking we could be very quiet.

“But it’s definitely a struggle to survive. We’ll see what happens in the next six months.”

Sam said he is relieved to be re-opening but is also anxious about the future.

“I’ve got three staff ready to work on the Saturday and Sunday, which is a lot of wages if we’re quiet,” he said.

“It’ll soon become apparent, we’ll find out in the first week or two if we’re a viable business.

“But for the area I’d say we’re about as well equipped as any, given we can seat so many outdoors.”

Max Heaton, from the Shibden Mill Inn, said; “We are very excited to be reopening, we were hoping for a little extra time to get ready but we’ve managed to get everything in place for a safe return for both our staff and customers. We can’t wait to welcome everyone back!”

Matt Browne, owner of the Stubbing Wharf in Hebden Bridge, said: “We’ve removed a lot of our tables and seats so it’s a lot less crammed.

“Tables are two metres apart, we’re going to use our function room upstairs as extra seating space all the time now, and outside we have spaced the benches out.

“We’re offering full table service for customers, including drinks and food.

“We’ve always been a place where you come to the bar to order but now we’ll be taking orders at the table.

“Outside will still be a situation of coming to the bar but we’re putting screens on the bar to protect staff and customers, and there’ll be markers on the floor for people to keep their distance if they’re queueing.

“We’re very excited, and relieved. It’s such a shame because we’re a seasonal business like most places in Hebden Bridge.

“We struggle through the winter and as soon as it hits April, that’s when everything changes and we’re very unlucky to have missed it.

“It’s a big relief to be open. We’ve had quite a good response from quite a lot of people. We’ve started taking bookings and had a few come in, so we are optimistic.

“We’re probably looking at not being as busy as we’d expect in July and August, but hopefully it’ll be a good level of trade.

“It’s hard to judge because we don’t know how confident everyone is going to be with going out.

“But we can’t afford not to be ready to deal with the customers who do come so we have to plan for being busy and hope that happens.”

Phil Chaplin, from the BAR & TAPAS an Aux Délices Co in Mytholmroyd, which is opening on Wednesday, July 8, said: “We’ve got sanitisers on the entrances and exits, the tables have been spaced out to a metre plus for people on them, there’s an enhanced cleaning routine.

“It will be table-only service, bookings only and someone on the door showing people to their tables.

“Since we announced we’re re-opening we’ve been very busy, but we’re going to have to ease back in. We won’t let ourselves get too busy so that people are squashed in.”

Gig Nilavongse, from the Golden Lion pub in Todmorden, said: “We’ll be from a 350 capacity down to 20 tables, which might be only about 40 people.

“People will need to book a table with us to come and sit down, and we’ll be doing takeaway beer that people can order outside.

“We’ll have the opera singer Nicola Mills and a pianist to entertain people.

“It will be great for the people. A lot of our customers are of an older generation and I think they’ve been quite depressed to be staying at home and not meeting people, so I think it will be uplifting.

“It’s given us time to have a break from everything. We’re quite a busy pub so it’s been nice to have a break.

“But it’s a shame we’ve lost quite a lot of important gigs that would have happened this year like Jarvis Cocker and we can’t re-book.

“But this will only be temporary so we have to get on with it and do the best we can.”

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