Obviously results are going to vary, however has anyone added dine in to an existing DELCO? What impact did that have on your lunch/dinner?
I would be curious as well. We have an unfinished dining room attached to our building that we hope to remodel in the next year or so. I was going to start a thread asking where would be the best place to find things like furniture, fixtures, ect. Our dining room is waiting until we finish our kitchen expansion.
I’ve been looking at auction sites and talking with an interior designer. My theory is it’ll be cheaper to get everything used and hopefully have someone who can refinish it to look cohesive than buy it new.
Yeah, we’ll probably do the same thing. My parents have remodeled several houses so we can do most of the work ourselves. I like to watch the shows like Restaurant: Impossible for ideas. But obviously, they are edited down. They do a lot of stuff with reclaimed materials, but they don’t always go into where they reclaim them from.
We have dine in and we run twice daily buffet. We have 200 plates trays and servers that need washed yesterday all the time. It adds extra labor but we also charge 7 bucks for all you can eat. Sometimes family of 7 comes in and buffet already loaded they pay 50 bucks we throw in 2 requests for buffet and make money. Its all about site specific info , foot traffic and what not
Here you guys are adding dining space, and I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of mine and not lose customers.
Not that I don;t like having a dining room, its more like what the available labor pool that I do not like.
we doubled overnight when we added seating for 75 approx 10yrs ago…we added another store to expand dining room for another 75 seats approx 4 yrs ago. If I had to do it all over again I probably woud have done without the dining room altogether since delivery has been our fastest growing area, but it beats having crappy tenants (we own the building) and after expenses it makes up for any lost rent and the customers like it…it’s the added labor (servers, buses, dishwashers) that I would love to do without.
I have actually tossed around the idea of a lunch buffet. It is not the norm for the Northeast so do you guys have a setup where you can “roll in” a portable type line for lunch and remove in the afternoon? We do alot of quick slice combo lunches that take up most of our seats and thought this would be a way to increase our average ticket and make service more manageable…thoughts?
I had just a 300 sq ft delco. Added 414 sq ft from next door. Made a 13 ft bar, added 5 tables with 8 bar stools. Put up three big tv’s, added modern decor like reclaimed barnwood on the walls, edison lighting, craft beer/sonoma county wines on a mid-tier scale(bottles are $29 and beers are $5) and boom we have a high end sports bar vibe full of energy and a hot bartender that guys come in just to see and hangout with. We’re packed for sporting events and even on slower weeknights guys will come in to watch Warriors games and have a few beers and a pie.
I’m a little confused… You doubled sales overnight and yet you wouldn’t do it again?
My thoughts to keep labor more manageable was to have a fast casual environment/counter service during lunch, and kind of transition to full service for dinner.
What percentage sales increase did you see when you added the seats?