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Late opening cafe

  • 24-06-2009 10:05am
    #1
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1


    Hello,

    I'm currently thinking of opening a late night cafe. Would anyone know if a licence is required to keep a cafe open late (no alcohol). Is there a reason why most cafes close at 6pm??


Comments

  • Posts: 0 [Deleted User]


    Because it would be a waste of time for most people to have a café open after the busiest time of the day when there is not as much profit as people think there is in it?

    Just a guess, I could be wrong.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 102 ✭✭bigbadben


    Because it would be a waste of time for most people to have a café open after the busiest time of the day when there is not as much profit as people think there is in it?

    Just a guess, I could be wrong.

    I largely agree with the above but I wouldn't rule out an idea just because there aren't many others doing it.

    What I would suggest is that you will have to market the cafe differently.I go to a cafe that opens till 11 every night and the focus there is on comfort and time(as well as the musts of product quality + service). There is plenty of space, the seating is akin to a living room and their is no one pressurizing you to hurry.It provides a nice alternative to a pub.

    At the end of the day what you make from 8-5 will be the real earner but if your willing to work 14-16 hours a day for the first year it may work out for you.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 30 enilec


    Hi Oceansun,

    Don't know if you need a licence to stay open late - the concept seems a bit silly to me.

    I just wanted to say that I know of a cafe that is late opening and it does very well. Actually, I think it might be a 24 hr cafe... It's in Waterford City & it's called Cafe Luna. Perhaps their success is in the fact that the cafe is located very close to the main night clubs and bars and does very good business in the early hours - don't know if dealing with all those drunken people would be much fun though.
    Maybe you should contact some owners of late night cafes and use their first hand experience to help yourself.
    Sounds like a great idea if not a lot of hard work - especially in the early days when you will probably be doing much of the slogging yourself.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,531 ✭✭✭blobert


    Not sure if they still do so but there used to be a number of Cafes around the Break for the Border/ Back of Stephens Green shopping centre that stayed open late, Cafe Mocca, Suffies Cafe etc.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 9,815 ✭✭✭antoinolachtnai


    Busyfeet still stays open until around 12 at weekends. Mocca (now Taste) used to stay open until 3 or 4, but not any more. Dunne and Crescenzi goes until 11 or 12 too, I think.

    From what I can see, it's about foot traffic and operations. You need a lot of foot traffic to justify the expense of keeping the thing open late. You would want to be looking at the high hundreds of thousands of covers per year really.

    You would also be looking at having quite an expensive site as a result. Really, with any cafe, you want the best site you can possibly afford. But this is particularly the case if you want to go late.

    Although it is a good idea to keep the concept as basically coffee-not-alcohol, to get the whole thing to gel, you would want to have the possibility of a wine licence. And food will probably have to be a part of it too.

    Then the operations.

    If you are operating a 24/7 or even a 17/7, you have practical problems. How do you get a good run at cleaning everything? How or when do you do maintenance? It is no fun to have a cafe shut down.

    (You could avoid this to some extent by not doing breakfast. It would also help to have a premises with two separate entrances, one of which can be closed whilst the other area is being cleaned. )

    In an older building, it is damned tough. Your initial fit would have to be really excellent and really well planned out to ensure that you basically never needed to shut it down again. My suggestion would be to do this in a new build. However, it is hard to find a new build in a suitable location.

    Your staffing needs to be pretty sharp, no fooling around. You need one person on duty all the time who really knows who to handle him or herself and the second person mustn't be any slouch either. You need to have a minimum of two of these people around every single night until you sell or quit.

    To justify the cost and complexity of these operations, you have to have a premises that is big enough to make it worth your while.

    I sound pessimistic, but I am in favour of your idea. It is hard to do. You have to think about running it in the same way that you might approach setting up and running a bar, except that your operating and busy hours would be far longer.

    To focus on the original question, there may be something in either the lease covenants or the planning permission which might prevent you from opening late. If there are flats overhead, you are likely to have a problem.


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