10 minute read
Happenings
May 2021
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MAy 31 MeMorial Day
We’ve all been looking forward to the summer a little more this year, so make sure your outdoor spaces are ready!
MAy 1 KentucKy Derby
Make sure mint juleps are on your bar’s menu today!
1MAy 9 Mother’s Day Brunch cocktails will go over big today.
MAy 4 national orange Juice Day
Go beyond mimosas and screwdrivers and try a Blood & Sand or an orange martini cocktail. MAy 1 national Fitness Day
Mental fitness is just as important as physical. Turn to page 6 to find out how to keep your mental health in tiptop shape.
May 25 NatioNal WiNe day
Red, white, or rose— any will do!
May 6 Nurse’s Week
Take care of those who have taken care of so many of us over the last year and offer up a menu of selections just for nurses.
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May 21 NatioNal Waiters aNd Waitresses day
your staff is your most important asset. Treat them to something special today.
May 31 save your heariNg day
Loud bars and live music can affect your hearing. Look into hearing protection like ear plugs!
Upcoming EVENTS
Due to the COViD-19 pandemic, the following information is subject to change. Check trade show sites for the most up-to-date information.
June 2021
Nightclub & bar shoW June 28-30, 2021 Las Vegas, Nevada
ncbshow.com
August 2021
NorthWest food shoW august 1-2, 2021 portland, Oregon
nwfoodshow.org
ecrm oN-premises adult beverage program august 24-26, 2021 Virtual
ecrm.marketgate.com
september 2021
tales of the cocktail September 20-23, 2021 Virtual
talesofthecocktail.org
HOW TO: MENU SELECTIONSHOW TO
Owners slim down menus, firm up inventory, and stay open to a new set of best practices.
The tidal wave that is the global COVID-19 pandemic took shifting for survival to a new level. While the global crisis wiped out many establishments, those that survived weathered the storm thanks to a mix of fluid decision-making, teamwork, and a willingness to change a once-successful business formula.
Although staying in business through 2020 is a major accomplishment, bar owners need to recognize that changes in best business practices and customer tastes are not just inevitable but unavoidable moving forward. As a result, the pendulum is swinging toward simplicity in recipes, menus, and spirits inventory.
When Less is More “We must make up for lost profits during the down time, so spending right now on wasteful product and labor is not worth it,” says Piero Procida, Food & Beverage director at The London West Hollywood at Beverly Hills.
He suggests prepping a report to see which drinks work best for your existing concept and which ones sell the most, and then edit accordingly. He also recommends shifting to recipes that don’t require too many ingredients.
“Your staff should focus on the art of bartending, proper pours, and making those drinks the best they can be,” says Procida. “This is not a time to experiment, especially if your volume does not support less popular cocktails. Take them off and add a classic cocktail that everyone knows, like an Old Fashioned or Manhattan. You can always spruce [it] up by using a smoker to make it more interesting, for example.”
Scott Daniel, Food and Beverage director at The Ballantyne Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, found that successfully reopening the restaurant before its bar helped him sort out the bestselling well and popular call brands while trimming spirits that were more niche and less popular. “We found that high-end bourbons, ryes, and tequilas were still in demand, but demand for single malt Scotches had diminished,” he says. “Besides reducing our overall number of offerings, we focused on creating modified versions of classic cocktails to cut back on the number of ingredients and specialty products. We found success with this
Colleen Hughes, head mixologist and beverage director of Charlotte’s Haberdish, pre-pandemic.
strategy, and will continue it into 2021.”
At Cure Bar in Rochester, NY, Founder Donny Clutterbuck says the first things to go were specialty spirits that required “hand-selling,” followed by brand-name ingredients that could be swapped out with comparable products. As Cure Bar is primarily a cocktail destination, another measure he took was removing beers and wines that sold out from inventory. “Creative uses of product and inventory solutions are a huge part of what we’ve been doing for the longest time, so maybe we’re already used to pulling these measures,” he says. “We probably learned to do it even better or quicker.”
According to Ivan Vasquez, owner of Madre Oaxacan Restaurant & Mezcaleria in Los Angeles, only the most popular cocktails that could “travel” well were on the menu when it was only open for takeout, taking the number of selections from 11 to four.
“We learned what our customers come to us for, and it’s not wine, it’s agave spirits and cocktails,” Vasquez continues, noting that he plans to keep the same approach until indoor dining is reinstated. “We only kept two beers [during the to-go-only phase] for two reasons: There was a shortage of artisanal beer due to the pandemic, and it did not sell fast enough to keep it fresh. Now that we are open for outdoor dining, we only offer two red and two white wines. We also had our fruit inventory in mind, only keeping cocktails that use fruit we also use in our dishes.”
“We launched our first big menu revision just days before the pandemic shut us down for seven months,” recalls Aaron DeFeo, co-owner of Little Rituals in Phoenix. “We had a lot of inventory that was still sitting on the shelves for our 30-cocktail menu, so trimming down the cocktail list wasn’t really an option. We discovered that without bar seating, however, none of our back bar items sold anymore. Our product mix became 95% menu cocktails, and [we] decided to run as lean as possible on back bar items.”
To curb potential losses and excess inventory, Little Rituals promoted the bar’s batched cocktails (such as its rotating punch specials) or those with recipes using spirits he had a surplus of for to-go canned cocktails to deplete items that were no longer bulk purchase-worthy.
Colleen Hughes, head mixologist and beverage director of Charlotte, NC’s
Pro Tip
The interior of The London West Hollywood at Beverly Hills.
Haberdish, calls this “cutting out the fat.” “At the start of the pandemic, we were sitting on around $55,000 of liquor inventory, so we challenged ourselves to be creative with what we had and retooled our cocktail menus to move existing products to minimize our liquor orders,” she says. “We stopped ordering barrels of whisky and started selling our collection of rare spirits. In North Carolina, we are not allowed to sell spirits retail, so moving our back stock has to be done, drink by drink.”
As the owner of Ramsey, NY beerfocused bar The Shannon Rose Irish Pub, Assistant General Manager/Beer Specialist Scott Jones curated 35 beers on draft and over 100 beers in bottles/ cans for its menu. After the COVID-19 shut down, this went down to eight beers on draft and about 50 bottles/ cans selections. How things were dispensed to customers also changed.
“We still have not opened up our draft lines and are pouring draft beer from keg o’raters and jockey boxes,” says Jones. “We continue to support our local breweries and try to keep as many of them on tap that we can, while keeping a few of the Irish staples on like Guinness and Harp. We still change our draft beers on a weekly basis depending on what is available from our local breweries such as Magnify, Brix City, and Bolero Snort. Ordering draft beers from larger distributers has been challenging as breweries are not brewing as much for on-premise locations.” Best Practices “As we navigate the challenges of the pandemic, we are analyzing every aspect of our business,” says Dave Oz, founder/ owner of Bathtub Gin in New York City.
Oz’s challenge was to make appropriate adaptations in décor and service while keeping his ten-year-old speakeasy concept intact. He developed an “outdoor hidden bar,” lending itself to social distancing, a redesign of the main bar allowing his team to move more efficiently, and greater storage space for spirits and glassware.
“The result will be cocktails served quicker, which is mission critical in a highvolume bar environment once COVID-19 restrictions are lifted,” he says.
For DeFeo, the pandemic triggered a major shift in Phoenix’s dining-out demographics. “Our new guests skew younger, and many of them have not spent lots of time in cocktail bars,” he said. “We are introducing this generation of customers to our fairly complex cocktails, and that takes a new strategy as well. But one thing is clear: They are coming here for the cocktails. We’ve never shied away from having larger inventories in the past, and having over 400 back bar spirits is part of our charm. However, we will now be extremely cautious on bringing on new items, and constantly working to lower costs on our existing cocktails, especially our premium well/rail items.”
Hughes’ Habberdish cocktail list was skimmed from 30-35 cocktails to 12 customer favorites and large-batch draft cocktails that are more profitable and can be easily sold to-go. She acknowledges it was a tough call to cut the bar’s “more conceptual cocktails,” but added that the restrictions made the staff more thoughtful about customer needs. Fewer man-hours of bar prep, a smaller customer capacity, and no alcohol sales after 9 p.m. helped bolster customer loyalty.
As Madre is known for having the largest collection of mezcal in the country, when the local ABC issued a temporary relief to sell bottles with to-go food, Vasquez’ strategy shifted. “We started ordering any mezcal that we had had before the pandemic so we could sell them for retail,” he says. “I knew many mezcaleros were not getting any financial help, so we decided to buy their bottles to sell.
“Customers responded well as they knew we still had the biggest selection in town. We kept ordering bottles when possible.”
The pandemic proved that when you reassess your business model, you may have created a road map to proceed in the future. “[The pandemic] taught me the appreciation of pour costs, and how every single ingredient can add up quickly,” says Procida. “It has also shown how important customer care is. It’s easy to take a busy environment for granted. But when it’s slow, you only really have a few guests and there is no excuse but to make sure they have the most amazing time. If one can apply that lesson during busy times, could you imagine the feedback then?”
The Shannon Rose Irish Pub.
In our first three decades, funded by leading distillers and led by an independent Advisory Board, we worked alongside dedicated advocates to create best-in-class, science-based educational programs, design cuttingedge communications campaigns and champion effective legislation that made our roads safer, communities stronger and families healthier.
That’s real progress — but we’re not done.
The next decade presents new challenges in the fight to advance alcohol responsibility — challenges we will rise to meet and overcome — but we need your help. Like the 30 years before, it will take the leadership, commitment and united effort of people like you— distillers who want a better, more responsible future for us all.
