Bride left scrambling after historic Paradise restaurant shutters without warning

Elizabeth Whitten · CBC News

· Posted: Mar 21, 2025 4:30 AM EDT | Last Updated: 11 minutes ago

The abrupt closure of the Woodstock Public House successful Paradise is forcing couples who had booked the venue for their weddings to scramble for an alternate arrangement.

"I was truly upset astatine archetypal and past tried to cod my composure arsenic champion I could. But yeah, we're inactive truly bittersweet astir it and conscionable truly disappointed for the astir part," Vanessa Bursey told CBC Radio's The St. John's Morning Show.

Bursey said a venue is similar a wedding's centrepiece, and losing it felt similar her program was falling apart.

The mates had made a $1,000 deposit successful December aft the events manager indicated different couples were eyeing the aforesaid wedding date, she said, and a down outgo would unafraid it.

"That's decidedly our adjacent challenge, is trying to get immoderate connection with the edifice and the owners to person that deposit refunded," Bursey said.

"We were told that the idiosyncratic who we spoke to — who I aboriginal recovered retired was so the owner  — was, quote, 'just the messenger' and that they would beryllium successful interaction this week astir a deposit."

So far, she said, nary 1 has followed up.

Bursey has been successful interaction with different couples who had their wedding plans cancelled. They also haven't heard backmost astir their deposits.

Almost a century

The Woodstock, which opened successful 1927, has been a fixture successful Paradise for astir a century. It has passed done the hands of respective owners successful that time.

Brendon O'Rourke, the astir caller owner, took implicit the concern erstwhile it was called the Woodstock Colonial Restaurant successful 2019 and renamed it the Woodstock Public House.

O'Rourke made the closure announcement implicit societal media connected March 6.

"Despite the difficulties of the pandemic and the manufacture since that time, we person kept our heads down doing the enactment that Woodstock was meant to house," O'Rourke wrote.

"It has been the joyousness of a beingness to get to cognize each the unit and patrons of the Woodstock. I anticipation that the adjacent proprietors volition unrecorded up to the bequest that has been near earlier us."

The March 6 station has dozens of responses, chiefly from radical reminiscing astir peculiar events they'd had astatine the edifice implicit the years. Some asked astir acquisition certificates they had purchased.

CBC News has asked O'Rourke for an interview, but did not person a response.

LISTEN | Listen to the afloat interrogation with St. John's Morning Show big Jen White:

Bursey says she has since recovered different venue, but The Woodstock had sentimental importance.

"It wasn't conscionable a generic wedding venue for us, it was thing that decidedly had a batch of meaning," she said.

"We don't privation to beryllium burned again. But we recovered a venue that we are precise assured we are going to dainty america good and hopefully this won't hap again."

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