Back at the Bar

I don't want people to think, from my last blog, that owning a bar is all work, but when people go to a bar they generally want a party, and throwing a party in your bar is a lot of work. So even when you are partying, you're still working. These things take a lot of planning, and I can't remember a single one that just happened, even when they looked like they just did.

Whether it's a simple every Friday night Karaoke Show, a Band, or having a special event, there is always a lot of planning involved. We had Karaoke every Friday night, and though it was one of the best shows around, we still didn't want it to get stale, so we were constantly looking for new twists that we could throw in to make it that much more special. If it falls on a holiday, that's easy, but on your average Friday night you might have to work a little harder to come up with something new. Sometimes we would have our chef create a special meal; sometimes we would have giveaways, whatever it took. Our show was always about having fun, and never about people being great singers. I think part of our success was getting people to let their hair down and relax and have a good time. Always get the people involved, and yes we could throw a hell of a good party.

One of our best nights was traditionally Halloween, right from the beginning people seemed to flock to our place on Halloween. Part of the reason was that during our Karaoke shows, while people were singing, we would dress them up in feather boas and silly hats, we had almost as many props as we had cd's. The people that came to our place were already used to getting dressed up, which made Halloween a perfect match for us. When you came to our place you would be hard pressed to find anyone that wasn't dressed up. For a very long time it was our record highest sales night. When I finally left the bar we were having two full-blown Halloween parties, one on Friday night and one on Saturday night.

Another good part we threw was when we got involved in a thing called "Erie Idol". It was a take off of the popular TV show American Idol, except our contestants would sing Karaoke so they didn't have to have the songs memorized, and there was no "Simon Cowell" harassing you if you didn't sing well. This show was put on by a local television channel and was sponsored by area businesses and a major light beer producer. They went to 10 local bars and three contestants out of 50 allowed to enter at each bar would win prizes and move on to the finals. We were the only bar that had all 50 of it's slots filled, and the sponsors told us we had had the best show and crowd of any of the locations. People who had been going to our bar all their lives said they had never seen so many people packed into that building, whatever the fire code said we were allowed to have in there, we were breaking it. To get to the bar from the kitchen we would run around the outside of the building because it would take twenty minutes to fight your way through the crowd in the main room. I had been stalking up on beer for a month before hand and when our Tuesday beer order came, we were out of a lot of things. Our tally for the night ended up being a normal weeks worth of business. We really took over that town for one night.

All of these events that we put on were a lot of work, and if you must know bars don't really make a lot of money, people just think that they do (even the week of "Erie Idol" we barely broke even). Your biggest reward in this business is the appreciation people give you for showing them a really good time.