For Vernon seniors now in their third month of social isolation due to COVID-19, it’s been a long time since their last trip to the local burger spot.
That’s why Graham Mann, general manager of the Fruit Union Plaza A&W, had his team make a special delivery of burgers and fries to the Vernon Restholm on Thursday.
Mann said he and his staff had been thinking about the support that’s been drummed up for frontline workers throughout the pandemic — from nurses and doctors to his own drive-thru staff — and wanted make a similar gesture to one of the hardest hit segments of the local population.
“We thought we’ve been getting a lot of love in the last couple months, and we were thinking of some other places that might be feeling the effects of what’s going on right now and what we can try and do to maybe ease some of that,” said Mann, who helped personally deliver 50 Mama burgers and fries to Restholm residents.
When Mann and his staff arrived Thursday, they were met with unbridled gratitude.
“I would have thought I was Santa Claus on Christmas morning, they were pretty thrilled,” Mann said.
A&W closed its doors to sit-down customers several weeks ago along with restaurants across the province, and Mann is hopeful that with a couple weeks time and a few safety measures, the restaurant will start to look normal again.
“I’m hoping maybe the first or second week of June there will be some kind of parameter put into place where we could start to open the doors again and we can get back to that normalcy we had before all of this.”
Mann said social distancing measures such as using every other table and keeping the restaurant at 50 per cent capacity could help businesses open sooner than later.
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