The kitchen is firing up again in the former White Spot restaurant on Terminal Avenue, but meals won’t be served to the public there.
The building has been taken over by the Salvation Army to prepare food for its meal program. The organization had been looking for a place to prepare meals since shutting down its kitchen and meal program operations at its New Hope Centre building on Nicol Street.
“Right at Christmas time, actually, when the snow fell, we decided, just because of the age of the building … we thought that it was time that we got out of that building,” said Jeffrey Baergen, Salvation Army New Hope Centre executive director. “We had plans in place, and we have plans in place, to demolish that building this year anyway.”
Baergen said the older half of the building will be torn down this summer and replaced with a larger four-storey structure over the next two years.
“We will be able to, obviously, offer more services out of there,” he said.
But vacating the Nicol Street site left the organization searching for a new location with a commercial kitchen. Attempts to secure the former Caprice Theatre building, located across the street from the New Hope Centre, fell through, Baergen said, when the “owner was unable to acquire the requisite building permits that he needed to lease us the space.”
The Salvation Army was able to make arrangements to move into the former White Spot restaurant.
Baergen said last week that staff were cleaning the kitchen in advance of operations moving there by this past weekend.
He said the Newcastle Community Association expressed concern over the Salvation Army starting operations there, but Baergen explained that the facility is for food preparation only and nothing would be served from there.
“We’re going to be doing our cooking there and delivering our meals back to 19 Nicol St. for the foreseeable future until the [new] building’s up,” he said.
The Salvation Army’s community response unit mobile canteen truck that was serving meals at 19 Nicol St. and 55 Victoria Rd., has been sent back to Victoria where the organization’s emergency response vehicle fleet is kept.
The Salvation Army served 125,400 meals in 2021. The number of meals served in 2022 is still being tallied and is projected to be approximately 144,000, according to figures from Bern Muller, Salvation Army director.
READ ALSO: Nanaimo Salvation Army sees 400 a day using meal program, needs donations
chris.bush@nanaimobulletin.com
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