Three separate restaurants in downtown Edmonton have announced they are closing their doors this June, with owners pointing to prolonged road construction that they say made it too difficult for customers to reach them. The most recent to fall is Playwright, a restaurant located just inside the Citadel Theatre, whose owner has openly blamed the disruption around the building for driving away the very audience it was built to serve.
Steven Brochu opened Playwright two years ago, choosing the location specifically because of what he described as a captive audience drawn to the area for the arts. The bet was that theatregoers and downtown visitors would provide a steady stream of diners, giving the new restaurant a natural advantage in a competitive market that often punishes independent operators in their first years.
That calculation began to unravel about a year after opening, when construction started on 99th Street. According to Brochu, the work blocked off the restaurant's doors and forced customers to detour through the theatre simply to get inside. The sudden barrier turned an accessible storefront into a destination that many would-be patrons found confusing or inconvenient to reach.
The owner said the financial damage piled up faster than the business could absorb. He explained that not knowing in advance about the road construction hurt the restaurant from the start and caused it to fall further and further behind on rent, on paying suppliers and on paying staff. Even with the construction now nearly finished, he concluded that the accumulated losses were too great to justify holding on until the work is fully complete later this year.
Playwright is not an isolated case. Two other downtown establishments, Commune Cafe and Kazana, have also closed this month, and both cited the ongoing construction as part of the reason for shutting down. The cluster of closures within a single month has raised concern that the disruption is taking a wider toll on the area's hospitality scene rather than affecting only one struggling business.
The chair of the Downtown Revitalization Coalition warned that more closures could follow during this construction season and called on the city to rethink how it is carrying out what officials have described as a successful project. For local operators, the worry is that each prolonged dig chips away at foot traffic at a time when downtown businesses are already trying to recover and rebuild their customer base.
Mayor Andrew Knack, responding to Playwright's closure, acknowledged the loss but said the city cannot simply halt construction. Instead, he said officials are changing how they manage projects and are looking to speed up the closures that most affect businesses. He noted that he had previously floated the idea of a financial assistance program for affected operators, though it did not make it through council, while one business owner urged anyone considering investing downtown to move slowly and be ready for sudden changes.