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Tuesday, April 30, 2002
There is an inherent Catch-22 in creating an warm, appealing setting for your restaurant. The more your customers enjoy their surroundings, the less they'll want to leave. The less they want to leave, the fewer customers you can serve. It's a delicate trick, balancing customer comfort and turnover. We'll have to spend time working it out, probably once we have some hard numbers on attendance.
Ideally, I'd like people to feel comfortable in crashing at a table for several hours or more. It seems to me that if there's always at least one table open, there's no economical need for us to force people out the door. It's a policy very much in place at Kopi Cafe, where Luke and I will often spend two or three hours on a Sunday morning reading the paper, without earning the ire of management nor costing us more than a single meal or coffee each.
This model obviously works best at coffee shops, where the atmosphere is meant to be more casual than a sit-down restaurant. Our place could be a mix of the two (it's been suggested here before), one half of the room filled with tables and the other half filled with couches and barstools.
As a service to our lounging patrons, we could even set up a bookshelf stacked with reading material and board games, a la Guthrie's Tavern. (Though with board games inevitably come disputes, so we'd be wise to keep plenty of reference material on hand. Any publicity is good publicity, for sure, but I'm in no hurry to hear Warner Saunders tell Chicago about a Scattergories game-turned-brawl at our place that left thirty injured.)
posted by Sandor Weisz at 3:20 PM | 5 comments
Friday, April 26, 2002
TGI Friday's has an ad campaign that pokes fun at frou-frou dining. I'm not sure which is a bigger blight on the restaurant landscape, the chain or the small portion, but it's nice to see one take a shot at the other.
posted by Luke at 5:53 PM | Comment?
Tuesday, April 23, 2002
YAPL: A vacant building on the corner of Byron Street & Lincoln Avenue piqued my attention as I biked by last week. I stopped, peeked inside, and was struck by the beautiful interior. I'm not sure what used to take up this building, but whoever it was sure left behind a nifty interior design.
Pros: Corner building; classy interior; classic exterior (I wonder who E. Rosenbaum was); near my house; large space.
Cons: Iffy location: besides Martyr's, CB2 and the American Theatre Company, there's little more than a collection of antique stores on the block; Very, very large space: the For Rent sign boast an available space of 7,000 to 17,000 sq. ft. What could we possibly do with that much space?
posted by Sandor Weisz at 3:30 PM | 11 comments
Thursday, April 18, 2002
A bunch of hard-core Chowhounders recently organized the first Chowathon, visiting 24 Chicagoland restaurants in a 24-hour period. One of them smartly invited along a Trib reporter, who covered the experience and summarized each of the stops on the tour in today's paper.
The list of visited restaurants reads like a laundry list of places I need to visit, places that embody the quintessence a Chowhoundian discovery. Hopefully I'll be able to join in on the next Chowathon. Until then, I've got plenty of places I need to get under my belt. So to speak.
posted by Sandor Weisz at 10:22 AM | 4 comments
Wednesday, April 17, 2002
Just as the Friendly Confines are free of any outside advertising -- at least for now -- so should be our restrooms. An ad-free ballpark lets you concentrate on the task at hand, and an ad-free restroom will do the same. This doesn't preclude posting such things as newsletters or pieces from today's paper, as long as those items properly reflect the mood of the whole place. I hate the idea that we're so cheap that we'd be willing to sell wall space over our urinals just to earn a few measly bucks.
Speaking of concentrating on the task at hand, we'd also be wise to follow the lead of the Dutch, who've implemented a fiendlishly clever idea in the men's restrooms in Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport that dramatically reduces clean-up time. I can speak from experience; it does work.
posted by Sandor Weisz at 1:17 PM | Comment?
Monday, April 15, 2002
Alternative idea on the tax front: on every tax day, sales tax is withheld for anyone who carries in an envelope addressed to the IRS. We could hire a courier to stand at the door and collect returns, then zip off to the post office every hour or so. We'd even provide free postage.
This is essentially equivalent to offering, what, a 9% discount? Our slogan could be, "We put the fun back in refund," except that refunds already are a lot of fun. New rule: you only get the discount if you're not getting any money back.
posted by Sandor Weisz at 1:43 PM | Comment?
While strolling down North Avenue on my way back from lunch last week, I passed by a restaurant I'd never seen before. I peeked at the menu in the window, hoping it would be cheap enough to add to my list of lunchtime excursion possibilities. Not only was it cheap enough, it had the following phrase at the top of the menu: All prices include sales tax.
First thought: What a brilliant idea! Second thought: If it's so brilliant, why haven't I ever seen this implemented at a restaurant before?
It makes too much sense. And unless there's so obvious drawback to this strategy that I'm missing, we must apply it to our menu. Tax has always added unnecessary anxiety to the buying process for me, so it's a refreshing feeling when I know the price I'm being quoted is exactly how much I'll be charged.
It'll help in other ways. Big parties will be alleviated of the hassle of including tax when trying to split up the bill. And I haven't done the math on this yet, but I have a feeling it'll somehow work in the favor of our waitstaff's take.
posted by Sandor Weisz at 1:05 PM | Comment?
Monday, April 08, 2002
Last week the Tribune had a story about people taking advantage of the current economic climate to go to restaurant school.
We've been fantasizing about the same since the beginning.
posted by Luke at 6:55 AM | 1 comment
Wednesday, April 03, 2002
We must not neglect the feeding of the "family."
Reza's is not my favorite restaurant in my neighborhood, but it has a long bank of windows, and I love walking past around 4 p.m. and seeing the "family" eating together before work.
My wait experience is limited to a summer in an ice cream parlor, where dinner was often nothing more than an hour in the back room making waffle cones ("One cone for the parlor ... One cone for me ... One for the parlor ... One for me ... One for me ... One for me ..."). Perhaps some of our more experienced readers can tell us about some of the interesting ways they've been fed before shifts.
posted by Luke at 7:22 AM | 8 comments
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