Tending the Bar
Decor, menu, and promotions build bar business
By Virginia Gerst, Special to R&I -- Restaurants & Institutions, 2/1/2004
Bars can mean mouthwatering profits for restaurants. The question is how to build up the business.
Traditional happy hours are old hat, say experts from New York to California. Instead, smart operators are using food, specialty drinks and eye-popping décor to draw crowds. Veteran Oregon restaurateur Bob Rice—who with partner Peter Goforth operates Portland restaurants Virginia Café and O’Brien’s—finds that today’s bar patrons want the option of having their drinks and dinner too.
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“If bar operators don’t provide an environment for people to do more than consume alcohol, they’re living in the past, not the present and the future,” says Rice.
He sees the happy-hour buffet as a smart business policy. Managers can discount food (with costs as high as 35%) as a lure while charging full price for alcoholic beverages (with 15% to 20% costs) and still increase profits while customers come away feeling that they have gotten a bargain. At Virginia Café, the $3.50 cheeseburger with fries helped land the bar on the short list of a local Web site’s awards for best after-work happy hours.
Filling seats and glasses
Dan Rosenthal also long has understood the value of the happy-hour
buffet. In 1989, when he leased basement space in a downtown Chicago
building to open Trattoria No. 10, he knew “something pretty
spectacular” would be needed to draw customers to the lower-level
bar. His plan: offer a sumptuous, bargain-priced buffet to an enthusiastic
pre-theater and after-work crowd.
Today, the subterranean spread rates a mention in several restaurant guides and has been named best happy-hour buffet by a local publication. Between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. on any given weeknight, 50 to 100 people pay $10 plus the price of a drink to feast on carved-tenderloin sandwiches, pasta dishes prepared behind the bar, shrimp cocktails, a half-dozen antipasti salads and more. By design, the buffet does not turn a profit.
“It’s an old-fashioned loss leader,” says Rosenthal. “We run anywhere from 80% to 100% food costs to entice customers to come in and buy $8, $9 or $12 glasses of wine.” He’s more than content when he eyes standing-room-only crowds. “The profit you make on an empty seat ain’t very much,” he observes.
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Two ultrahip Dos Caminos restaurants in Manhattan lure the see-and-be-seen set to their bars with a 100-bottle tequila selection, carefully chosen to highlight the restaurants’ Mexican cuisine.
Greg Harrington, corporate director of beverages for New York City-based multiconcept operator B.R. Guest Restaurants, individualizes offerings at the group’s 12 operations—which include Ruby Foo’s, Blue Water Grill and Blue Fin—to fit each concept. He says tequila promotions at the 18-month-old Dos Caminos on the Upper East Side and the 11-month-old Dos Caminos in the SoHo neighborhood have been especially successful.
It is a high-volume business. The uptown Dos Caminos averages 650 covers a night on weekends, 400 nightly during the week. According to Eben Klemm, B.R. Guest’s director of cocktail development, half again that number visit the bar, where an appetizer menu designed to pair with bar offerings includes tuna ceviche and chicken flautas.
Printed drink menus detail tequila options, complete with tasting notes. “We do better because of the list,” says Klemm. “It helps us sell drinks that we normally would not.”
Margaritas, the top-selling cocktail, are available in a $9 house version made with oak-aged tequila. Premium brands bring more. If so inclined, a guest could lay out as much as $125 for a margarita made with a rare, super-premium pour.
“Personally, I wouldn’t do it,” says Klemm, “but some customers do.”
Printing
profits
While the cost of opening a Dos Caminos unit is sizable, it also
is possible to build bar business on a budget.
In Seattle, Stan Templeton introduced desktop publishing at his two 24-hour 13 Coins restaurants. In-house menu printing allows his operations to stay on top of beverage trends, which he considers key to their success. “It gives us the capability of changing things on the fly,” says Templeton. “If you outsource to a printer, it takes too much time.”
The 13 Coins bar menu is revised weekly to reflect frequent vintage changes in the extensive wine list and to incorporate drink crazes. Lemon drops, kamikazes and cosmopolitans are current favorites.
A change in décor also can boost business, according to Templeton, and he points to his business-district 13 Coins to prove his point. In November 2002, he closed its bar for a month, reconfigured the space and reopened with 62 seats (up from 30) and a new look that blended the vintage style of the old place with new touches. As a result, evening business doubled and lunch business is big for the first time. “People come in just to see the décor,” he says.
They also come to see bartender Gail Coward, who has been on the job for 32 years, and other veteran staff members, who make customers feel welcome. “An institution like 13 Coins depends on Gail and employees like him,” says Templeton. “They have regular customers who come in to see them.”
No one should discount the importance of personal contact and friendly service, agrees Rice. “The setting is important, of course, but more importantly, it’s the personality and feel of the experience, which comes from employees and how they treat the customers,” he says.
It’s no wonder that, when hiring bartenders, Rice and Templeton both look for personality first.
“We can teach them the menu and our system in pretty short order,” says Rice. “But we can’t teach people how to have an outgoing personality and greet a stranger with a sincere welcome. That’s a fundamental principle of staffing: Hire the personality and teach the skills.”
Virginia Gerst is a Chicago-based freelance writer.
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