While business owners scramble to adjust to new ways of operating during the pandemic, some restaurants have changed to a take-out and delivery only model, while others have decided to change their operation entirely.

Back on March 17th, Ugly's Pub & Grill in Lacombe decided to close their doors prior to their big St. Patrick's celebration in order to prevent spreading the virus.

Instead, owner Cindy DeMott and her daughter and co-owner Taylor decided to give back to the community by providing meals free of charge to anyone who needs them.

Taylor says they didn't want their recent food order to go to waste once they started thinking about how this shutdown would affect their community.

"Once we closed our doors, we had just done a huge food order and we had tons of vegetables that we get locally, meats and everything that we could have frozen, but the other half would have gone bad. So we just kind of thought, my mom just thought, she's like, well I bet you food banks are going to close soon and there are a lot of people, even before this happened, there's a lot of people in need. So she just decided, let's just do free meals. We'll donate meals out the back door of our bar daily between 4-6 pm. So we did it for a few weeks."

After they made a Facebook post advertising these meals, they realized how high the demand was and they wanted to help as much as they could, including delivering meals to those who can't make it to their back door.

"We had quite a few seniors calling because Meals on Wheels stopped. So there is a lot of elders who don't have family around here, some of them don't even have their driver's license anymore, or they just like, at 89 years old you probably shouldn't be going into a grocery store at this time. A couple of people just called and explained to us that they saw an ad that we are donating meals so we started delivering quite a few meals."

An example of one of the free meals from Ugly's Pub & Grill

Taylor goes on to say that it's not just the seniors who need help right now.

"There's a lot of single parents out there, even people that aren't single parents who are just lower income or who are sick, so we just kept doing this and it started to come out of my mom's pocket. She just wanted to help as much as she could. And then we started to have quite a few people hear what we were doing and they started to donate to us, whether it be Joe's Greenhouse who had been donating fresh vegetables weekly, we've had quite a few people donate money towards groceries and supplies. It's most other local families and friends of ours, which has helped out a fair amount." 

DeMott says they also thought about all the students who are out of school, who might be in need of another meal during the day which was usually covered by the school, or various school lunch programs. She says they plan on giving away free meals for as long as possible.

Unfortunately, DeMott says they had to lay off their entire staff once the pandemic hit, but she says each of them will have their job back once they are able to re-open their doors. 

For more information, you can give them a call at 403-782-0402, or email them at uglyspubandgrill@gmail.com