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Thursday, May 02, 2002
Here's an amusing tale on communal dining. I'm still hooked on the concept. (Via JP)
posted by Luke Seemann at 9:10 AM | Comment?
Wednesday, May 01, 2002
Swanville, Minn., is a small town that found itself without a restaurant and thus without a central location to shoot the breeze over coffee. The townsfolk quite understandably found this intolerable, so 67 chipped in $5,000 each to create Granny's Cafe, a co-op restaurant.
I've mentioned the notion of collective ownership before. How long do you suppose it will be before we have 65 friends willing to drop five big? Perhaps we need to start making friends who are more well-heeled.
(Confidential to current, average-heeled friends: I'm just kidding.)
(Confidential to wealthy readers: I'm dead serious about this. Let's be friends!)
posted by Luke Seemann at 8:28 AM | 1 comment
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 5:20 PM | 5 comments
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