Tag: Tosca Cafe

Restaurant/Cocktails=Bar/Food?

An interesting phenomena of recent years has been the bar with really tasty food.

When we first moved to San Francisco, circa the early 90s, the restaurant and cocktail worlds were pretty separate.

You could get awesome food in many restaurants, but rarely in those same restaurants could you get good cocktails. Actually, often you couldn’t get ANY cocktails at all. Wine was King in upscale dining. And while you could get good cocktails in bars, rarely could you get food much more advanced than fries and an adequate burger.

I hate to single out one person and one restaurant, but I think when the Slanted Door added cocktails and allowed Thad Vogler to bring his vision of upscale cocktails in upscale dining locations to that restaurant, and every other restaurant he worked in after, it was the shot heard ’round the world, at least in the Bay Area.

Suddenly, you could get a good drink that wasn’t wine in a fancy restaurant.

More recently that idea has been turned on its head by bars like Alembic, Trick Dog, Old Bus, and Tosca Cafe, some of which have been making the Chronicle annual Best Restaurants list. Suddenly, you can get not just an OK burger in a BAR, but REALLY good food.

However, having REALLY good food in a bar means that people who wouldn’t ordinarily be going out to bars to drink/drank/drunk with their friends, like, say, ME, have a reason to visit those selfsame bars.

And while I know Trick Dog has always made a point of having non-alcoholic options, (thanks to fellow traveler Josh Harris,) Tosca Cafe shows that this isn’t always the case at this arguably new form of bar/restaurant.

IF you are going to the trouble to have food which might attract a larger audience than your average bar, THEN perhaps you should also provide some beverage menu options for those of us who might not otherwise be attracted to hang out in your bar.

Tosca Cafe, 09.23.2016

tosca

Apparently, Tosca Cafe agrees with Bruce Dern’s alcoholic Dad character in the movie “Nebraska” that, “Beer Ain’t Drinkin'”. The lowest ABV beverage on their drink menu is a 7oz pony bottle of Miller High Life clocking in at 4.2%. Now, admittedly, when I was drinking, I had a tendency to call Miller High Life, “Vaguely Beer Flavored Vitamin Water”. Ahem. We live and learn.

How about some statistics?

  • As anyone knows, you will sell more of any drink if you put it on the menu.
  • Leaving any drink as an off-menu choice to be explained by the bartenders and servers costs them time. Time they could be using to serve other guests or make drinks. Time is money.
  • In the dining room, it also adds a second problem of misunderstandings between customers and servers and also between servers and bartenders. More often than not, bartenders can make more than a few off menu non-alcoholic drinks, but few servers have been trained to understand the full spectrum of drinks the bartenders may know and be able to execute with the ingredients they have on hand. More than once I’ve told by a server that the extent of a restaurant’s non-alcoholic drinks is water, coffee, tea, and a few soft drinks, only to discover a completely different story when sitting at the bar and talking to a bartender.
  • Plus, asking about an off menu bar item means the server has to take a trip to the bar, get the attention of the bartender, ask what he can make, then bring that information back to the customer. More time wasted, and more money wasted.
  • When calculating pour costs for a bar menu, i.e. how much the ingredients in a drink cost, the management usually doesn’t even take into consideration the cost of non-alcoholic mixers, (unless they are exceptionally expensive.) Lemon Juice, Lime Juice, and Orange Juice, for example, must be squeezed every day, and are usually thrown out after a day or two. These ingredients are just part of the cost of doing business. Looking at it like this, selling non-alcoholic drinks is, essentially, making a profit on what is a “rounding error” for most bars and restaurants. Thus, non-alcoholic drinks may, in fact, help a bar to gain profit on what otherwise may go down the sink at the end of the night.
  • While we’re talking about costs, let’s not forget that most of the “pour cost” for drinks is usually in the spirits and alcoholic mixers, so from the restaurant’s perspective, putting a well executed non-alcoholic drink on the menu, even at a lower prices the regular cocktails, is probably going to have a higher profit margin for the restaurant than a regular cocktail. Something I am more than willing to allow for, if it encourages more restaurants and bars to serve good non-alcoholic drinks!
  • According to a Gallup Poll from 2004, on average, 37% of Americans totally abstain from liquor. A bit less for the younger folks, but significantly more once adults are over 50.

Americans and Alcohol

“According to the aggregated data, 63% of Americans report that they drink alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine, or beer, while 37% totally abstain. Men are more likely than women to drink (69% vs. 58%), and adults under 50 are substantially more likely than adults over 50 to drink (70% of adults aged 18 to 49 drink alcoholic beverages, as do only 54% of those over 50).”

So, for adults, we’re talking about approximately 1 out of 3, to nearly 1 out of 2, Americans who don’t drink, depending on the average age of the patron in your restaurant.

If you don’t have an item on your food menu you can sell to one out of every three people that comes into your restaurant, would you consider it a success?

Likewise, then, is your restaurant’s bar menu a success, if the only option you offer to non-drinkers is water?