REGINA, Sask. – The long-awaited details of what the entertainment venue will look like at Queen City Distillers have been revealed.
On Wednesday, Brandt CEO Shaun Semple released the concepts and vision for the entertainment venue, which will include a music venue, a sports bar, a speakeasy, a premium wine and spirit bar, an Italian restaurant, and a liquor store.
In speaking to SaskToday, Semple outlined what the vision entails for the property at the REAL District.
“I think everybody before knew that this was going to be a live music venue and there was going to be a sports bar and some other concepts that were around it,” Semple said. “I don't think they knew a lot of the details behind it, so what we did announce is we announced the scale of the project.”
On the venue side will be the music venue, which is named The Jack, named after “my uncle Jack Semple, who has been a guitar player in Saskatchewan and represented Saskatchewan a lot of different things over the years and really is a kind of a treasure for Regina. So we named it after him.”
Their sports bar will be called The Draft Room. “The Draft Room is kind of a play on obviously what it's like to be drafted as an athlete and so on, but also a perfect pour for a beverage, beer, that kind of stuff. So that's what that's called.”
Their premium wine and spirit bar will be called The Vault. Semple said The Vault will “be that place that you go to to have that real specialty drink and not only will you have that great glass of wine or our mixologist will make you that drink, but you'll also get a bit of a show with that as well when they pour it and so on.”
On the second floor will be their Italian restaurant called Bellaterra.
“Bellaterra means ‘beautiful land.’ Of course, we live in a very rich agricultural community here in Saskatchewan and Regina is in the heart of that, which is actually Saskatchewan is 50 per cent of all the farmland in Canada. And we want to pay tribute to the farm-to-table concept, and so Bellaterra will be our Italian restaurant — all homemade pastas, everything homemade pastries, homemade bread, everything is on that farm-to-table type concept. “
Off of the Bellaterra will be their speakeasy, he said, which will be called The Last Note.
“The Last Note is memorable. Obviously, you go to a concert, you kind of remember that song or that last note in the song. It's a place you go before and really you go after the show and it's a late hour. It's an intimate setting. It has a performance stage. It's a little bit of Las Vegas brought to Regina and I think we want it to be a great setting and I think it'll be something special.”
Their last concept at the location will be Legacy Wine and Spirits, which is “our liquor store and it's really more than a liquor store that's there.”
“It's going to have full hosting. We have sommeliers there, we have 12,000 bottle temperature controlled wine cellar that will serve The Vault and the wine store, so you can go get that special bottle that you want. So it'll be a unique inventory multi-year kind of storage system that's there.”
A key component will be three live stages on the whole property. The Last Note will have one, as the Draft Room Sports Bar, while the main stage in The Jack will accommodate 1,550 people. Semple said there will be “opportunity for local musicians as well as touring musicians to come play in all of that.”
In the Draft Room, they plan to feature before-game and after-game sports announcing right from the stages, including interviews. It would be similar to “what you would see almost if you went to the Grey Cup and they'd set up these temporary broadcast stations in the public.”
In between and after, he said, they will also be performance stages for music and for other types of activities, and they “have big screens on them, big ceiling to floor width of the stage screens for watching the big game as well.”
The whole effort is an ambitious one, and one that Semple says has evolved.
Evolving to a prime destination
“And I've been asked how did it go from this to that, and if you look back and think about when we started out, the one thing that I knew is that this was not our core business. I needed to have a lot of smart people that knew this business around.”
He pointed to people like Jim Cafarelli, who “did all the House of Blues in North America and really was familiar with doing live music venues. He had done all the House of Blues but he did more than that and Billboard magazine had the top 25 of the top nine of those 25, six of them he had built so I said, Jim I need you on our team, so he's really helped open our minds of what this place could be.”
Semple said they also brought in from Toronto a design agency that does “only hospitality design,” and also brought in the founder of Tait Towers, James "Winky" Fairorth, whose company is “the largest entertainment company in the world when it comes to designing stages, designing sound and audio, managing theme parks, all the universal parks, all the Disney parks and all the SeaWorld parks in the world.”
Semple believes the venue will be a prime destination once it is completed.
"There won't be anything like this in Canada at this point where it's one connected space,' Semple said. Among other things, he pointed to the audio and video in the venue, with the audio and video alone within the Jack alone costing around $10 million.
"It will be one of Canada's only immersive sound systems. Immersive sound systems are very new, but it's what the Sphere in Las Vegas has. It's what the Coliseum in Las Vegas has. Anywhere you sit in that space, the sound is awesome. It's a lot more money to do it, but it gives you a whole different perspective. It's really good if you're bringing in even entertainers like a comedian where you can hear them, you can see, you've got all the visuals. It'll be really overwhelming when you see all the effects that we have going on in this room."
As for what Semple is looking for in terms of performers and in filling dates in the venue, he said it will be “highly weighted towards music but not only music.”
“We will try to fill this between 100 and 120 times a year. That's kind of the floor plan. So we'll have a selection of local acts that will play there from time to time. We'll have touring acts that will come in and do that from a standpoint of bands and so on. We'll have other productions that we will put on … We will allow it to be booked out for other corporate events or special events like a Grey Cup or other types of venues. It's an intimate setting style venue. It's unlike anything else in town because you can get right up and close with the entertainers and that's what's going to be so unique to this venue.”
It's a considerable investment from Brandt — upwards of $70 million. The next question becomes: how to make this a viable venture.
"Well, there's no doubt this business is a very competitive business. It's very thin margins on it," Semple said.
"I think the key is we need to activate the total space. The breakdown is roughly $45 million on the venues, $25 million on the distillery. The building is actually, the modifications are on top of that. The long haul is really activating everything within the project. There's a naming rights and sponsorship part of that. There's a food and beverage part of that. There's a ticket and entertainment part of that. All of those things have to work. If it works right and it's well supported by the community, then it'll be successful. If it's not supported by the community, then it won't be."
Already there is considerable excitement in the business community about the new Queen City Distillers entertainment venue project.
"It's a generational type of announcement," said Mike Tate, CEO of the Regina Chamber of Commerce.
"It has the potential to become an economic driver for our community here in terms of attraction of tourism, giving our citizens an awesome place to go and do business and socialize and connect before sporting events, and live music opportunities for our arts community. It's got so many different assets under one roof, that I think it's such a wonderful investment for our city, and it's coming from private money, so we're just thrilled."
Tate believes this will be a game changer in terms of attracting tourism and also new residents.
"You talk to people outside of the city and it's always like 'what shall we do in Regina?' And this becomes an automatic answer for them."
Semple is of the same mindset.
"You see a lot of these kinds of places in places like Las Vegas This is our way of kind of putting, like you said, Regina a little bit on the map, reverse the flow of people leaving Regina to go see things, to getting people to come to Regina to see things."
Project expands
Already there has been considerable work under way at the entertainment venue site. Semple is looking at an April-May target date to open, to take advantage of the runup to the Grey Cup being hosted in 2027.
The actual project is running a bit behind schedule — delayed from what was hoped to be a 2027 opening by the end of this year — because the project has expanded considerably. Semple noted the concept had grown from 52,000 feet to 87,000 feet.
He said this led to the decision to move the actual distillery portion to the Avana Centre to give the entertainment venue more space at the old Agribition building, located next to the Brandt Centre.
He believes the venue will be a big hit and a "social media darling" when it opens — pointing to the venue offering a more intimate up-close-and-personal experience of watching a live performance.
"Stadiums are great to go see the concert there, but you're a long ways away. You don't get the same feeling. When you go to a smaller venue and you see the artists back up front and close and everybody's condensed, you have this intimate energy that changes the whole level of excitement that you feel at these places. It just feels like a happening place. I think that's what we're trying to draw on. It won't feel like a theatre-type show. It'll feel more like, oh boy, I'm in the mix and this is unreal and you're up close with the entertainer…"
Overall, Semple can't wait for the venue to get up and running.
"I think we're looking to try and create a beautiful experience for people. That's really what this is about. There's many ways to do it, but I think the experience and really what falls out of experience is memories. We're telling our people that we're in the memory business, and a memory happens the first time. We got to keep creating first time for everyone in this venue. That's really the goal. I think we'll have something here that Regina would be proud of. We can say, we have it. You don't have it in Saskatoon or Winnipeg or Calgary or Edmonton. We've got it here."
