Village News

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  • Barry Dyck, Guest Author
  • Retired Executive Director, MHV
Pavilion
Newly built Summer Pavilion at Mennonite Heritage Village.

Our new event centre, built to replace the big white tent and give us much-improved facilities for programing and community use, served as a very useful overflow facility for our restaurant’s Mother’s Day buffet. Our weekly Sunday Buffet in the Livery Barn Restaurant (LBR) is popular on most Sundays, but it is always most popular on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

Perhaps the quaint setting in a “barn” or the relaxing walk from the parking lot to the restaurant is the attraction. But more likely it’s the great food and friendly service that keeps people coming back.

This year just over 400 people chose the LBR as the place to treat “Mom” with a lunch she didn’t need to cook. The restaurant itself only has seating capacity for about 100 people, so additional space was needed. Since the weather was a little too cold and windy to eat at our outdoor picnic tables, our new building saved the day. We had set up just over 100 chairs in there on Saturday, assuming that 200 total seats would be enough as people came and left over a period of three hours. But the extraordinary turnout sent us scrambling to roll out a few more tables and unpack six more boxes of new chairs. In the end, we did find seating for everyone inside the two buildings.

Features of our new building include glulam beams, a wood ceiling, six large glass overhead doors to allow in a lot of light, and a polished concrete floor. Visitor’s comments about both the venue and the food were positive. We are thankful to the Penn-Co people who worked extra hard to get the building ready in time for this event.