A Toronto-area restaurant kept its doors open well after its normal closing time for the Boston Bruins following the team’s Game 6 loss to the Maple Leafs on Sunday.
Now, four employees from the Canyon Creek Chophouse in Mississauga, located about 20 miles from Air Canada Centre, will be in attendance at Monday night’s Game 7 in Boston as a result.
According the Globe and Mail, the visiting Bruins learned during their 2-1 defeat to even the series at 3-3 that a malfunction with their charter plane home would leave them stranded in Toronto for the night. So shortly before 11 p.m., Canyon Creek’s usual closing time, a call was placed to the restaurant to see if they could accommodate the team’s party of 50.
Lauren Grenier, the restaurant’s service manager, didn’t believe what she was hearing, but said she’d keep the restaurant open another 10 minutes. Sure enough, a bus pulled into the parking lot a short time later, and the hungry team filed into the building.
“And then it was just chaos,” Grenier told the Globe and Mail. “We just started hammering out the food for them. It was just so awkward. We had all the music off, but we had the TV on, I think with the Detroit game. And they were all sitting there, and it was so quiet because they had lost.
“But they ate so much food – steaks, chicken, pasta and salad. Some of them were a little picky and wanted personal things off the menus. We tried to do whatever we could for them.”
The crowd was so big — and the restaurant so ill-equipped to handle a group that big at that time of night — that a call had to be placed to another nearby restaurant owned by the same company to have more servers and cooks come to help out.
By 1 a.m., the team was preparing to leave, and Grenier mentioned to a Bruins executive how exciting it would be to attend Game 7 at TD Garden.
Next thing she knew, Grenier had four tickets to the game, and at 4:30, she, restaurant general manager Alex Rigas, server Darren Boast and bartender Scott Leinster were in a car headed for Boston.
“Three of us will be wearing Leafs jerseys,” Grenier told the paper. “Darren is a Boston fan.”
