A Long Haul for Belong Sharbot Lake

Jeff Green | Jan 11, 2023

Brad Long was first interviewed by the Frontenac News in October of 2021 about his plans for the former Maples Restaurant in that is the first thing people see as they cross over the causeway coming into Sharbot Lake from the south,.

At the time, he said that he planned “to have the restaurant ready for take-away service, a major aspect of the business, by January (ish) with patio service following in the spring and summer.

That statement turned out to be prophetic, but not in the way that he had hoped.

But first to the good news.

Belong Sharbot Lake will be opening in January(ish) of 2023, even if it never did open at all in 2022. One of the final hurdles to opening was cleared just this passed Monday when a Hydro One contractor reinforced the Hydro Pole that is adjacent to the fully renovated restaurant.

“All I need now is for Hydro to hook up the power, and then a couple of days work on the plumbing and the electric, and we will be ready to open,” he said later that morning.

He did not know how long it would take for that to happen, but was doing whatever he could to help that process along.

Once the work on the restaurant is done, he said he will open for takeout very quickly, working with his wife and daughter at first, before assembling a staff in order to open the dining room for in-person eating later in the year.

“I feel that because of the delays, the bar has only been raised as people have watched and waited for the restaurant to open. I feel more pressure, but that's ok as well,” he said.

It has been a long hard slog to get to this point, however.

“I had a guy who worked for me in Toronto come up and look at the restaurant, and he said it would be an easy turnaround, that it did not need that much work. This guy had always been pretty pessimistic in the past, so I figured he was right. But the more we delved into things the more we found that the building had very little holding it together,” he said.

He figures there were 5 of 6 incarnations of the restaurant, continually adding more materials onto a structure that was under built in the first place.

There were other issues that he had to deal with, including dealing with water use because of the lack of a septic system on the site. He could have put one in, but didn't, partly because he did not want to change the way Sharbot Lake looks and feels.

“Putting in a septic system would have been very expensive, but what really stopped me was the fact that we would have had to alter the site too much. Removing the hill behind the restaurant would have been necessary, and I felt that would have altered the landscape too much. I'm not here to make the land fit my needs and desires, that's not what this is all about,” he said.

So, Belong Sharbot Lake will have to use less water than other restaurants.

Even with the delays, there were plans to open for the summer of 2022. A hiring fair was held at the St. Lawrence College Employment Centre in May, and people were hired, but they had to wait.

“I know I inadvertently screwed people over, telling them to wait and wait, and then finally realising that I had to stop. I had to strip the building down and build it up properly. That took even more time.”

A full year after purchasing the building, there was still a dumpster and porta-pottys on the site, and no hydro in the building, but throughout the fall all of that began to change as the external face of Belong Sharbot Lake began to come together.

The design of the dining room will be another surprise for customers, even for Brad Long himself.

“I ended up designing the overhead lighting fixture myself, on the theme of the Canadian Shield, and it has been installed, but without Hydro I still haven't turned it on to see what it looks like when it is lit up. That's another reason why I am itching to know when the hydro crews will be coming.”

Not that he lays blame on Hydro, or anyone else he has worked with locally, for all the delays and the expense he has gone to without starting to cook any food for the local community 16 months after buying the restaurant.

When Belong Sharbot Lake does open, the vision and the intention that inspired Brad Long to leave Toronto and renovate both a restaurant and an old farmhouse in a small Frontenac County community will not have changed.

The food will be locally sourced and made on site, as much as possible. This includes all of the desserts, and most of the bread – Sheryl Brooks, Brad Long's wife, happens to be a pastry chef.

Flavour, nutrient value, enhanced by cooking techniques geared towards revealing the inherent flavours in all of the ingredients, will be the order of the day. Another key aspect of the restaurant will be its relationship with food producers and with its own staff.

Paying a living wage to all of the workers, which includes a no tipping policy, is another founding principle.

When asked if he is considering the demographics of the local community in designing his menus and pricing, Long said “I have to do that. It does no good for me to open a restaurant and fail in a year or two.”

One of the benefits of spending so much time in the community before opening the restaurant has been meeting a diverse group of local community members, who will now become the market that Brad Long will be serving.

“There is a very complicated community here. There are people with very little money, and people with more money, and I need to make food that everyone wants to eat, and can afford to eat,” he said.

To accomplish the daunting task of producing high quality, well prepared food, without pricing itself out of the market, Belong will need to develop a strong take-out business with the kinds of items people are familiar with, prepared with high quality ingredients.

In addition, a changing menu of full meals in a box will also be available.

Finally, the 30 seat dining room will offer a fine dining experience.

“I see this as a kind of progression from what I started doing when I ran the Food Service at the CN tower, to opening my own restaurant in Toronto with a partner in 2008, and when the opportunity to start a restaurant in a small town I felt it was something that was right for me to do. It's been a learning experience already, with all that has happened,” he said.

Soon, very soon, that learning experience will enter a whole new phase, when the question in the local community will be 'what are they serving at Belong?' instead of 'is that place ever going to be opening up?'