restaurant bar stools

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3 Tips for Choosing Great Restaurant Furniture for a Small Venue

Designing a small restaurant or pub can require creative thinking to make the most of a limited space; knowing how to select the right furniture and layout is essential.

Small restaurants can have very big advantages for entrepreneurs, but can also present them with very difficult design challenges. A smaller venue brings with it lower costs and less overhead. The price of rent, as well as utilities such as heating and cooling, can be significantly lower. A much smaller wait staff and kitchen staff is also an advantage of a small restaurant or pub, and initial design costs will often be significantly lower in a smaller space.

Choosing the right layout and restaurant furniture for a small venue is essential to a customer’s impression of the establishment. A small venue done right can come across as cozy, intimate and comfortable, whereas a badly designed small venue will seem cluttered, crowded and unpleasant. The following are three tips on how to choose the right furniture and layout to make a restaurant or pub a big hit in a small package.

1) Utilize bar and counter seating

Bar and counter seating is a great way to get a lot of people seated at your establishment, while still offering wait staff and customers ample space to move around. A bar placed on one side of the room adjacent to the kitchen with seating on high bar stools is great not only for spacing – it also can establish a venue as a place to congregate in the neighborhood. Customers who might normally just be ordering food and soft drinks are much more likely to order alcohol while eating at the bar, which will definitely boost profits.

Counter seating along the restaurant’s front windows is also a great way to save some space, and offer diners who value their privacy an appropriate seating option. Seating with a street view is pleasant for diners in your restaurant and can serve to pull foot traffic in from outside. (more…)

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Designing Advertisements for Your Bar and Restaurant (Part 2)

In the previous post, I went over the basics of creating a simple ad in a graphics program. Because there are so many design programs available, and you will have to spend time learning them in order to become an effective designer, it can be time consuming and frustrating. You have another option though. You can choose to hire a graphic designer to take care of the ads for you. He or she might also be able to develop your menus and even restructure your logo if you wish.

One of the great things about the Internet age is that you can hire someone from a thousand miles away to do the work for you. No longer are you limited by your geographic location. That means you have countless thousands of graphic designers from which you can choose.

When you are choosing a designer, you need to check out their portfolio to make sure that he or she has done similar work in the past. They do not have to have a lot of experience, but you do want to see what their work looks like. Most of the designers have online portfolios now, so you can view their work before you even contact them. (more…)

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Sporting Events Should be the Lifeblood of Your Sports Bar

Swivel bar stools

If you are the owner of a sports bar, you have plenty of chances throughout the year to really capitalize on the major sporting events that are happening. While you might always have the games on at your bar, it really isn’t enough to drum up the excitement you need to pack your bar. There are plenty of other sports bars in town, and you need to make sure that you are constantly doing something special that is going to draw in larger crowds.

As a sports bar owner you have an advantage over many other types of bar owners. People are already coming to your bar because they love sports. How you handle the big events is going to determine how well you do in the long run though. Consider the largest events in the world of sports: the Super Bowl, the World Series, the World Cup, the NBA finals, collegiate sports . . .  the list goes on and on.

Whenever there is an event such as those discussed above coming up, you need to make sure that you advertise your bar and what you offer. Have game day specials, appetizers for half price, discounts for people who come in wearing jerseys, etc. There are dozens of different things that you can do to get people excited about your bar. Something that you might want to try if the hometown favorite loses is to offer “drown your sorrows” discounted drinks. Make sure that you don’t just focus on the “Big Game” though. There are plenty of playoff games that can get people just as excited.

What are some of the other things that you have to do to make sure that you have repeat customers coming back to your bar time and again? You need to make sure that you have an adequate number of TVs, and that they are spaced throughout the bar so everyone will be able to see, and so that you can have more than one game going at a time. You also need to make sure that you have adequate bar seating that is comfortable and that doesn’t make your place feel too crowded. If your seating is old and shabby, consider buying new as soon as you can. Ever little bit you do is going to help your sports bar become memorable in the minds of your customers.

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The Modern Sports Bar: (Part 2)

In The Modern Sports Bar: (Part 1), we looked at the importance of décor and people’s perceptions when they first walk into your bar. Now, we will examine some of the other things you are going to need to have the best sports bar in the city.

What’s On the Tube?

You need to have televisions and plenty of them. Choose high quality TVs from a reputable maker, such as Sony. They might be more expensive than some of the lower end televisions out there, but the picture quality is going to be better. You also need to spring for high definition. Since most people have HD in their homes and they already have large flat screens, you need to be able to compete.

You don’t want to focus on only one sport, and that’s why you need to have more than one television. You want to have as many as you can comfortably fit into the bar, and you need to make sure that you have satellite that works on all of the televisions so you can have them set to different stations and catch the most sports possible. This will help you appeal to a larger crowd. More sports equal more people.

Seating is Important Too

Something that many people don’t consider when they are creating their sports bar or renovating the one that they already own is the bar’s seating. Too often, they search online or through catalogs and choose the cheapest alternative for their tables, chairs, and bar stools.

This is a mistake. (more…)

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The Modern Sports Bar: (Part 1)

Everyone has their own preconceived notion of what should be in a sports bar, and you might be surprised to find out that those notions are often the same across the board. If you run a sports bar, or you are considering opening one, there are a few things that you simply need to have.

Set the Stage with the Right Décor

The minute someone walks into your bar, they are judging it. The first impression they get is very important, and it is going to play a part in whether or not they become a return visitor. The interior “look and feel” of your bar is important.

If you haven’t given much thought to what you are going to use as the décor in your bar, now is the time to consider it. Sports memorabilia is a nice touch for any sports bar. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a sports bar that doesn’t have signed photos, jerseys, pucks, balls, and other gear on the walls. (more…)

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Bar Stools Fun

So… this post was going to be about how to easily and cheaply get your restaurant ready for Valentine’s Day. It’s coming up soon and you don’t want to be left behind. After all, when it comes to restaurants and romance we all know this is one event you absolutely can’t miss. But, that can wait a few days for our next post because I just learned something funny and fun about bar stools.

Really.

Did you know that in the state of Wisconsin there is a winter sport called “Bar Stool Race”? Apparently it happens every February in the town of Drummond.

The race consists of two contestants sitting on a bar stool that is attached to skis being pushed down a hill by a team member. The first one to finish (or the one that managed to remain on the bar stool all the way down) is the winner of that round. Eventually one team (and their bar stool), get to go home with a trophy.

I don’t really know what the rules are but I know that having a bar stool is a must. I also think that a swivel bar stool is probably not a good idea in this case.

From what I could see this looks like a really fun, although somewhat unconventional, activity. So if you have a spare bar stool or two and are planning to visit Wisconsin this winter why not give it a try?

Here is a link to some pictures of last year’s bar stools race.

By the way, can you guess what the next post will be about?

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