Dépanneur John owners in interview

 ---Deschênes pizzeria plans delayed but not diminished

Despite seeing progress with plans to open a pizzeria in Deschênes delayed and extended at least a few months, Dépanneur John’s co-owners Élie Saab and Raouf Fawzi are dedicated on delivering on their vision as soon as possible. With a business plan prepared over a year ago, Saab explained that the project foresees opening a pizza service counter inside the family-owned convenience store located at 54 chemin Vanier.

Providing a long-awaited service to the neighbourhood, the shop will offer a wide selection of freshly cooked North American style pies – made in-house in its kitchen in the back of the store – and also expects to serve a variety of Greek food. Planning to include an Aylmer-wide delivery service as well as in-person pickup, the shop will not be designed to provide dine-in service, Saab said.

Pointing to Fawzi as the project’s mastermind, Saab, who boasts many years of experience running pizza shops, joined as a business partner, wanting to help provide a service the neighbourhood has been lacking – a nearby eatery.

Ready to go through the regulatory process with permits and adjustments, Saab and Fawzi reached out to the city of Gatineau in September of 2019 to discuss the requirements to open the pizza shop. Those included obtaining a construction permit and the property’s architectural floor plans from a licensed architect. Hiring a third-party contractor for the job, Saab said he received the property’s architectural drawings in May.

Restaurants are required to have one compliant parking space per 10 square metres, rather than one for every 30 square metres for dépanneurs. After much back and forth with the city, the owners learned there would need be a minor variance to designate four parking spaces for the pizza shop, six for the dépanneur and two for the building’s upstairs dwellings. The SUDD (Service d’urbanisme et du développement durable) explained that a property’s minimum number of parking spaces must serve a use and is calculated according to their utility and its occupied area - according to the municipal zoning bylaw. Another e-mail from the SUDD to Saab - sent on October 2 - stated that the project’s architectural drawings showed that the property was only zoned to have four compliant parking spaces. Noting that the shop wasn’t designed to provide dine-in service and that traffic congestion in Deschênes is a relative non-issue, Saab feels like the minor variance is unnecessary.

With plenty of parking space along chemin Vanier, the surrounding streets and since much of the shop’s clientele will reside within walking distance of the store, he added that the city hasn’t accounted for the reality of how people live in the neighbourhood. But the most distasteful aspect of the process so far was that the city waited so long to notify him about the parking spot conundrum – noting it should’ve been brought up at the very beginning. “They even waited for us to pay $140 for the construction permit before notifying us of this issue,” Saab said.

Supporting the project since being consulted about it in June, Deschênes councillor Mike Duggan felt upset with how little the city cooperated with Saab and Fawzi in ensuring the project comes to fruition. Calling it a bureaucratic power grab from the city, Duggan downplayed the minor variance request’s importance - adding that everything could be feasibly resolved in as little as five minutes. “You check all the boxes, you submit everything, and then [the city] comes up with something else,” Duggan said. “I’m always terrified with projects about [the SUDD] imposing laws that don’t make sense; they don’t know our local culture; they don’t know the local geography; and they’re imposing bureaucracy rules on us that do not fit.”

Pointing to a noticeable lack of commercial infrastructure in the area, Duggan noted that parts of Old Deschênes are included in major development plans for Gatineau’s urban structure. With high density buildings and more proximal services on the horizon, he believes the pizza shop could be a catalyst in establishing Deschênes as a popular community for entrepreneurs and businesses in Aylmer. Noting that Dépanneur John is already beloved in the community and has plenty of history operating in its location, Duggan is confident that the pizza shop inside it will be an instant hit among locals and hopefully a long-term success.

Now, in the best-case scenario, Deschênes Pizzeria, Pizza Deschênes or whatever it ends up being called could open in the winter of 2021, although “opening in the winter is not ideal, but better than not at all,” Saab said. Despite how frustrating an ordeal it has been, since the shop was initially planned to be open by now, Saab feels fulfilled knowing he did everything he could to make the situation work out in his favour.