Tobin Ellis believes that designing a stunning, immersive, right-sized, well-placed, highly functional bar should not be that hard. What makes it hardest is the mindset that pervades nearly all design and development: bars are afterthoughts. Here he expands on these thoughts in an excerpt from his book “Bar Design Essentials: How to Design Bars That Work for Everyone.”
Reprinted with permission from the author.
The Empty Square
Designing a stunning, immersive, right-sized, well-placed, highly functional bar should not be that hard. What makes it hardest is the mindset that pervades nearly all design and development: bars are afterthoughts. I’m not convinced this dogmatism is deliberate. Architects tell me frequently (in confidence), they don’t really understand the ins and outs of designing a highly functional bar, which is why we have a field of specialist consultants who often perform that task. Many of these consultants also confide in me, “We know kitchens and we can lay out a bar, but it’s not our area of expertise.” I think this quiet admission by so many in the design-build pipeline reinforces the genuine desire to achieve true functionality, but a lack of understanding on how to get there. Everyone wants the bar to accentuate the rest of the room. They want it to be beautiful, and they want it to tell the story of the concept. They want it to showcase their design prowess to their next client. And in fairness, they do want it to be seen as functional, but they don’t necessarily understand what that really means or how to accomplish true functionality at that level. None of these aspirations is to be shamed, as it is a normal, appropriate pursuit for most of the design and construction professionals. If anything, this simply makes the case for bar design specialists who do have the expertise and the operational background to design highly functional and ergonomic bars.
A lot of this section of the book is aimed at zooming into all the things designers, contractors,
architects, and kitchen consultants have never been shown that can make or break a great bar, and therefore the total true experience of an entire hotel lobby, stadium, restaurant, or cruise ship.
What would help all these interconnected industries that support the hospitality ecosystem is to arrive at the simple, obvious truth that a bar is no more or less important than a kitchen, nor is it “just a counter with some equipment behind it.” A bar is the engine that drives the entire business. If you want to put your finger on the pulse of an entire establishment, place it on the bar top.
Instead of drawing a basic geometric shape in any arbitrary corner of the room and letting someone else toil away at making it actually work; you could employ what every other skilled designer does: inside-out design. You don’t design the body of a car and then cross your fingers hoping all the parts that make the car actually drive will magically fit inside. You don’t design a stadium and then pray that there’s room inside for the field, the people, the seats, the passageways, and everything else. You don’t design a square bike tire and then hand it off to a cyclist to “make it work” just because you think it’s creative to introduce a square tire. You design products first to meet those functional requirements, and then you start to unravel the opportunities for expression, creativity, and innovation as you become more and more versed in the fundamentals of what makes the product work. A bar is not a living room, or a long table, or an afterthought. It’s a key piece of machinery that has many very hyper-specific requirements that must be designed in or else that entire department and therefore most, if not all, of the guest experience will suffer. And when the guest experience suffers, the investor experience always suffers.
Start with the end in mind and prioritize the full design of all the bars in a building or a space well before you fall in love with how to wrap them in pretty things. Do not let the bar remain an empty square in the middle of the plan set while every other piece of FF&E is carefully placed. Design them together and start with purpose and objectives, which will inform function and everything else. This is how simple great bar design can be. This is how my studio approaches every bar we design: inside-out. And also collaboratively with those who excel at aesthetics. When the aesthetic design teams are lock-step with the specialist design and operational teams—day in and day out with at least one person who can translate back-and-forth between these two worlds—the results are always monumentally more beautiful and productive than when these tribes work in silos, and pay only lip-service to collaboration.
But why is the bar design so important to the guest? How good is the branzino with nothing to wash it down with? Can’t you just taste that sizzling hot fajita with a glass of tepid tap water? Nothing like an ounce of Osetra caviar paired with a nice, tall glass of dusty nothing, right? It’s not hard. Food and beverages are inextricably linked to any culinary experience. It doesn’t have to be alcohol, though often it is. But when we go out to dine, to celebrate, or just to avoid the cooking and the dishes, most of us want something to sip on to enhance the entire experience. Not at any random time, either. You want that glass of wine, the mug of beer, that tall icy glass of fizzy cola when your food hits the table, if not sooner. If all the focus on the design is on the kitchen, and the bar is left to the whims of people who don’t work behind them, half the dining experience is probably halfway down the drain.
But to the business-minded, there is much more at stake. Simply and almost without a single exception, every beverage served in a restaurant or bar is significantly more profitable than any food item that can be made in the kitchen. Also, few people order “rounds” of entrees or really any food item. But most people order at least a second beverage, if not more. The margins are higher, the labor cost is lower, the ticket times are much faster, and the result is most often a much more jubilant room of humans. Put another way, no great story ever starts with, “So I was eating a salad…” There is truth in this. Revelry, celebration, relaxation, and yes, even slight inebriation have always been at the heart of lifting the human spirit and making sense of an often otherwise confounding, cold world. Make it hard to get a drink and watch your business slowly walk out the door.
Nothing in food and beverage hospitality is simpler: build a great bar, and surround it with quality food, service, and ambiance, and watch your investment return to you faster and longer than you thought possible. This isn’t a platitude; it’s actually the entire business plan of the single most influential, profitable, largest, and longest-lasting full-service restaurant group in the world. From 1965 until the writing of this book, one company was built that made the bar the center of the business and flourished globally for 50 years. In fact, almost every other restaurant group of any scale you’ve ever heard of took this first company’s playbook, systems, theories, right down to their menu items and their people, and used this time-tested model to build theirs. I spent seven years working for them and traveling the country opening new restaurants. Every single one of them put the bar at the center, as the engine that drives the business.
I’ve met a lot of operators who wish they could generate more sales and profits from their operations. I’ve not met one—ever—who wished they could decrease their bar or beverage sales. Ignore the bar; ignore your greatest chance of turning a profit. Champion the bar and ensure your best shot at realizing returns on you and your partners’ investment.
