DRYDEN — November 4, 2026
Boston Pizza is coming to Dryden. A “coming soon” post that circulated in the What’s Happening Dryden group on Tuesday evening drew an enthusiastic response from residents — and the chain’s own hiring confirms it is more than a rumour: Boston Pizza’s careers site has been advertising opening-team jobs for a Dryden restaurant at 559 Government Street since October 25, and staff training is set to begin the week of November 23.
The company has not announced an opening date, and none was stated in the post shared locally on Tuesday, which was an image announcement that drew about 40 reactions and a stream of comments from residents saying they can’t wait — along with one immediate practical question, “Do we know a date yet?”, which remains unanswered. What the hiring record does establish is the stage the project has reached. Restaurants do not recruit and train an opening team on speculation: the Dryden postings span the full floor and kitchen — servers, hosts, bartenders, line cooks, a culinary supervisor, a front-of-house supervisor and restaurant management — in both full-time and part-time roles, which is the staffing shape of a restaurant preparing to open, not one being considered.
The postings put some numbers on the opening. Servers are listed at $17.95 an hour plus tips, with higher starting offers possible for experienced applicants, and the roles come with the chain’s standard package of benefits for qualifying staff and meal discounts. More significant for reading the timeline is the training line carried in the postings: training begins the week of November 23, 2026, and joining the opening training program is preferred for new hires. A training start in late November points to an opening that follows once the team is ready — but until Boston Pizza or the local franchisee announces a date, any specific opening day circulating locally is a guess, and RL News is not going to print one.
The address in the postings, 559 Government Street, places the restaurant on Dryden’s main commercial strip — Government Street is the Highway 17 route through the city, carrying both local traffic and the through-travellers of the Trans-Canada corridor. For a restaurant-and-sportsbar format, that corridor is the natural location: visible to highway traffic, central for local guests, and on the same strip as the city’s other chain and retail anchors. Dryden, a city of roughly 7,500 and the service hub for a wide surrounding area of smaller communities, travellers and resource workers, has a dining scene that leans heavily on local independents and fast-food formats; a fullservice national casual-dining chain is a notable addition to it.
The format is the other half of the local reaction. Boston Pizza, founded in Edmonton in 1964 and grown into one of Canada’s largest casual-dining brands, runs a combined restaurant and sports bar under one roof — family dining on one side, a bar built around televised sports on the other. The sports bar side was the first thing at least one Dryden commenter named on Tuesday, calling it a good place to watch sports, and it fills a specific gap in a northern city: a dedicated, licensed venue built for game nights, playoffs and the long winter season of televised hockey, in a community where winter entertainment options narrow considerably once the lakes freeze.
There is also a straightforward jobs story in the arrival. A full-service restaurant opening team — kitchen, floor, bar and management — is one of the larger single-employer hiring rounds a city of Dryden’s size sees in a year, spread across entry-level roles that require no previous experience and supervisory and management positions. The postings have been open since late October and are advertised as closing in mid-November for some roles, ahead of the training week, so anyone locally who wants in on the opening team is working with a short window.
What to watch next is the announcement the hiring points toward: a confirmed opening date from the company or the franchisee, and the visible finishing work at the Government Street site. For now, the “coming soon” is confirmed by the strongest available source — the company’s own recruitment for its Dryden opening team — and Dryden residents who have been asking whether the city would land a national full-service chain restaurant have their answer. The date is the only part still missing.
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