Posted May 9, 2008, 4:49 PM
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: San Francisco & Tucson
Posts: 24,071
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Quote:
Friday, May 9, 2008
Dining now an all-day affair at S.F. restaurants
San Francisco Business Times - by Sarah Duxbury
One of the hottest new additions to downtown restaurant menus is all-day dining.
Despite San Francisco's high minimum wage and mandatory health insurance for all employees, more restaurants here are finding it's worth their while to stay open during that no man's land between lunch and dinner.
Recently, Perbacco added an expanded in-between menu. It's designed to capture workers who end their days in mid-afternoon. Other restaurants, like Salt House and the new Pat Kuleto restaurants on the Embarcadero, have offered an in-between menu since their inception, while Absinthe in the Civic Center recently introduced an all-day bar menu that consolidates its former in-between and bar menus.
There's no single reason why these restaurants are tweaking the traditional two-meal offering that is the norm at most restaurants.
"We saw an increasing number of people coming in between 3:30 and 4, after the stock market closes and their day is over. They're hungry -- not necessarily for an entire meal, but for more than nuts and olives," said Umberto Gibin, owner of Perbacco.
At Perbacco, the kitchen staff that handles the shift from lunch to dinner was already working, so there's no real increase in employment costs. The tweener menu there is carefully crafted so that chefs are not needed to prepare the salumi platters and panini that Perbacco offers. More complicated items, like pastas, are not on the menu.
Business has increased since Perbacco began its more robust offering, particularly on Thursdays and Fridays when several dozen people come in for wine and nibbles.
Over in SoMa, Salt House and Town Hall have offered a limited all-day menu from the start.
Asked about the pros of offering a limited menu between lunch a dinner, co-owner Mitch Rosenthal said, "There are none financially. It's not used that much. But it creates a certain feel that people can come in and get something."
Epic Roasthouse was actually designed with all-day dining in mind. Bar orders are cooked in a different, second-floor kitchen with a dedicated chef that also serves private dining groups.
That second kitchen is "really quite unique, as far as restaurants are concerned," said Todd Caine, Epic Roasthouse's general manager. "It's more than proven its worth."
Epic's lunch ends at 2 p.m. and dinner doesn't start until 5:30, but at the bar, diners can still enjoy a $25 hamburger or small-plate finger foods, as well as one or two daily specials available on the all-day bar menu but not in the main dining room.
It also helps drive bar traffic.
"We didn't want to discourage people from coming to the bar because there was no food," Caine said.
[email protected] / (415) 288-4963
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Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2008/05/12/story6.html?t=printable
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