DECC, Bars, and Other Entertainment Venues to Reopen Indoor Service

DULUTH, Minn.– Restaurants aren’t the only businesses in Minnesota that will be welcoming people back inside. Entertainment venues can start up again for indoor service as well.

Along with restaurants, places like bars and entertainment venues will soon be allowed to welcome limited numbers of customers indoors for the first time in nearly two months. And places we spoke to today say they are ready to go.

With the governor’s new orders, establishments are ramping up to open their doors again.

“Well, we’re not going to go into a place we haven’t been before,” said Ben Hugus, the Co-Founder of Ursa Minor Brewing.

Foster’s Sports Bar and Grill in Hermantown has been using the down time to renovate parts of their bar and dining room, including a new coat of paint, new carpet, and a fresh bar.

The establishment has been seeing a good amount of business with curbside orders but nowhere near where it was before the November shutdown. Now they can welcome customers and staff inside again.

“Things were starting to pick up again for us until we got shutdown again so it was hard,” said Pete Kilroy, Owner of Foster’s Sports Bar and Grill. “Once we open up our doors at 11:00 a.m. on Monday, I think people are going to come back and keep it steady. I don’t think it’s going to be slow. I think they’re excited to be back.”

Over in Lincoln Park, Ursa Minor has been serving people outside on its patio for the last few weeks but are excited to open up their taproom again.

While business has been up and down this year due to the pandemic, Hugus says they rely on heavily on the taproom for business. And with already having to go through a reopening last summer, management says they are trying to learn from the time before.

“Little interactions that you wouldn’t have thought about before the pandemic, now we do think about and we’re like, ‘how can we make that interactions safer?’ Honestly, it’s a million little things we do and we’re just trying to kinda take each one apart and make it better,” said Hugus.

And other entertainment venues around Duluth are preparing, including the DECC. No more than 150 people are allowed inside each venue at the facility, allowing for more guests to use the space. While it’s not as much as the 250 people allowed in before the November order, management at the DECC welcomes any group of visitors inside.

“A facility like the DECC is not like a smaller venue or a restaurant we just have, our tagline is, ‘we have the space’ because we do,” laughed Reinert. “We have a lot of indoor space.”

Walz’s shutdown over late November and December cancelled events that would have given the DECC their busiest month. Now with restrictions being lifted, some of those events are working to try and come back in the coming months.

“We’re looking at a quarter two, April, May and June, that will be the busiest the DECC has seen since the first quarter of 2020 so again, over a year. And that’s really good news,” said Reinert. “We can see the light at the end of the tunnel and we know it’s not another train coming at us.”

DECC management says other events scheduled this year are deciding to push back their events a few months instead postponing them into next year to allow more time for vaccine distribution.

A decision on if fans will be allowed in at Amsoil Arena will come from UMD. The venue’s capacity limit will decide attendance.