A celebrated Indigenous chef is shutting down his northern Ontario restaurant because he lost his sense of smell due to COVID-19.
Gerry Brandon, 61, opened L’Autochtone Taverne Américaine in Temiskaming Shores four years ago with his partner, Nancy Cassidy.
Brandon is Anishinaabe, from Dokis First Nation. He’s a survivor of what’s become known as the Sixties Scoop, a series of government policies that saw thousands of Indigenous children taken from their homes and placed in foster care or adopted into non-Indigenous families between 1951 and 1991.
L’Autochtone means “Indigenous” in French. The restaurant combines English, French and Indigenous cuisine, and has garnered rave reviews from food writers and customers for blending those flavours.
“We’ve had people come to us from Holland who had heard of this restaurant when they arrived in Canada and made the trip from Toronto,” said Brandon, adding “they felt transported … say they’ve learned more about Indigenous culture in one night in our restaurant than they did in school their entire lives.”
The restaurant got off to a difficult start due to the pandemic, which set in early in 2020.
“It was devastating,” said his co-owner, Cassidy.
“Overnight we lost 75 per cent of our business and we’ve never recovered it. I think four lockdowns were just too many lockdowns.”
Brandon said he felt enraged when other sectors were allowed to continue unaffected by the pandemic and government restrictions.
“Just rage and all the levels of government that didn’t help us when they could,” he said.
“You’re here in the north, where you’re surrounded by resource extraction who never shut down a day due to COVID and yet, you know, were producing COVID cases.”
The restaurant survived the four lockdowns, and it was Brandon’s and Cassidy’s hope to eventually transfer the ownership to their staff.
“Our plan was five years,” Brandon said. “Five years and we would be out, and we would only be popping our heads in now and then to see how everybody’s doing. They could take the ball and run with it.”
About a year ago, Brandon became sick and tested positive for COVID-19.
“I just seemed to catch a wicked cold,” he said. “I’ve never had anything like it before.”
He lost his sense of smell and it never fully returned.
Losing his smell also affected his sense of taste, which was devastating as a chef.
“It’s made everything more difficult,” he said.
Without a timeframe for recovery, Brandon said, it made it too difficult to keep running the restaurant. He said he no longer has the energy to keep going.
Brandon plans to sell the business, but hopes a young chef can take it over and continue what he started.
“It’s a turnkey operation that a young couple could take over,” he said.
“And there’s an apartment above it. They could really take something and put their own stamp on it and run with it.”
What’s known and new about long COVID
Chris Verschoor, a researcher with the Health Sciences North Research Institute in Sudbury, specializes in infectious diseases. He said long COVID-19 is still largely misunderstood by scientists.
But he said there are a couple of leading theories as to why COVID-19 can produce a wide range of symptoms over an extended period of time in some people.
The first is that because the virus is so new, people didn’t have any prior exposure or immunity to it early on.
“Your immune system is fighting off something that’s, you know, really sort of threatening to you,” Verschoor said.
That strong immune response in some people could lead to longer-term symptoms in some cases.
The second theory, said Verschoor, is the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, enters the body’s cells through something called the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor.
“The unique thing about these ACE2 receptors is that they’re all over the body,” Verschoor said.
“COVID is a respiratory infection because we have ACE2 receptors all over the epithelial cells of our lungs. The lining of our lungs is just covered in these receptors.”
But the nasal cavity and mouth contain olfactory cells that have the same receptors. That could account for the loss of smell and taste for some people who contracted COVID-19, Verschoor said.
With growing research into treatments, and greater immunity thanks to vaccines and past exposure, Verschoor said, long COVID-19 could become a rarer condition. At the very least, we could have better treatments for people who get sick, he said.