08-08-2023, 03:54 PM
(08-08-2023, 03:39 PM)dtkvictim Wrote: Definitely not my experience regarding food hours, but looking through Google maps it seems you're more right than I thought. I guess I just don't patronize the places you're describing. Yet downtown seems to be much busier doing workdays, and honestly is a bit of a ghost town at night considering the number of people who live here. This weekend I was looking for some late night food with friends and the options felt limited, and they commented on how depressing and dead downtown was. I don't go uptown terribly often, so my view isn't as nuanced I'm sure, but every time I'm there I'm shocked at the number of people out and about. It feels like on any given evening there are 10x as many people on the uptown streets vs downtown (20x if you discount the homeless), and the overall vibe is so much more positive and lively.
There are many more people in DTK in the evenings now (not late-late, we definitely don't have a nightlife kind of downtown) since COVID, the new buildings and the DTK patio program. More restaurants (and bars) are opening, and still more people are moving downtown, so I don't know that it'll be dead, at least not at 7 or 8 PM. If the target time is midnight, though, this is not your town.
As for Waterloo, I was chatting with a Waterloo resident at the Waterloo Jazz festival a few weeks back, and he was insistent that there is a much better selection of restaurants in downtown Kitchener (barring "fine dining", as he said) than in Waterloo. The grass is greener on the other side of the fence?