QuéPasa restaurant saying goodbye after 25 years

Sarah Rennie

After a quarter century of serving up delicious meals in Ormstown, the Restaurant QuéPasa is closing its doors.

“This Saturday, August 7, will be our last day of operation,” says Linda Moore, who along with owner Laurier Caron, announced their sudden retirement from the restaurant business on Facebook following the sale of the century-old Victorian style brick building that housed the restaurant for 25 years.

“The sale process due to COVID was very lengthy, leaving us with little time to wind down the restaurant operations,” explains Moore, who admits it will be hard to close without being able to tell many of their regular customers about their retirement in person. “We have a lot of our customers who have been coming for 25 years,” she says. “We will miss them.”

The restaurant had already been on the market for about five years when the pandemic forced its closure during the spring of 2020. The business remained closed through the summer before reopening briefly in September; then the region became a red zone during the second wave in mid-October and the restaurant was once again forced to close its dining room. Moore and Caron continued to serve take-out meals until they were finally able to welcome customers back to the terrasse and dining areas again in May.

“Fortunately, since we opened again, we have been swamped,” says Moore, who credits loyal customers who continued to order take-out meals with helping to keep the restaurant afloat through the pandemic. “COVID made it really hard on us,” says Moore, who admits she will not miss cooking in a hot kitchen while wearing a mask.

“You just kind of forget you’re for sale, and then all of a sudden we had people calling,” she says, who believes a pandemic-fueled housing boom in the area is partly behind the sale. The building, which was originally built as a family home by William Greer in the early 1900s, has been sold as a house with a family set to move in before the start of the school year in September.

Negotiations for the sale took over two months, and because the couple did not want to say anything in advance of a finalized sale, there has been little time for proper goodbyes. “It’s really not how we wanted to go out,” laments Moore, who says that despite the bittersweet end to their career, they are especially proud of their time with the restaurant.

“We met there, we lived there, and we got married there,” she says of the exceptional memories that have accumulated over the years. All six of their children have worked at the restaurant, which first opened in 1996 with a menu that fit on one sheet.

“We would like to thank all our friends and customers [who] have faithfully supported us over the years,” Moore says, before adding a special “thank you” to their family, and to the staff that have contributed to the restaurant’s growth throughout the years.