26 Degrees in the Shade . . .

Income Generator for Your Spanish Bar or Restaurant At New Year

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A New Year’s Eve Party

If you have an English bar or restaurant in Spain you can make a great income in the low season, when cash flow is less abundant, by putting on a good New Year’s Eve party.

The most profitable way to achieve this is to create an all ticket affair where you advertise the types of food, drink and entertainment you will be providing. To maximize ticket sales you should promote your party by word of mouth. You can also place a small box ad in the local press around mid-November. However, this may not be necessary once you are established - for example we normally sell out by word of mouth only, well before New Year’s Eve.

You’ll need to tell people if you’re going to have a sit down meal or a buffet. The buffet is in my opinion the most profitable option, and the least work intensive.

Make it clear which types of meat and seafood you’ll be preparing and make sure you mention that you’ll have plenty of vegetarian dishes too. If you do a really excellent buffet the first year, you will quickly establish a reputation and people will be ready and waiting to buy tickets when it’s time for your next party.

The entry ticket price should include all food and drink up to say just gone past midnight. Don’t forget to cost some Spanish Cava (Spanish Champagne) into the price of the ticket. I normally allow 2 glasses per head. It is important to have a few spare bottles of Cava in reserve just in case there’s more demand than anticipated.

A lot of large restaurants will be putting on very expensive cabaret dinners. This leaves a big gap in the market for smaller establishments to fill. Lots of people on the Costa del Sol want to go out to a restaurant on New Year’s Eve; some will want to spend wildly, but there are plenty of people including a many of your regulars who will prefer the smaller less expensive celebrations, in your bar, where they can party with a crowd that they already know.

An Intimate Affair

Following my last post which offered advice about how to put on a good Christmas party for your regular clients; I would now like to talk briefly about how you could build your party into a more intimate occasion, with a clubby feel about it, involving some of your most stalwart regulars,

After a full year of trading you will have developed quite strong bonds with some of your regular clients and you’ll find that some of them will be really keen to get involved in helping organise your party. These regulars will want the party to be pretty much exclusive and they’ll want to help you create that all important “clubby” atmosphere.

One way they’ll want to contribute is by bringing in Christmas decorations, prior to the party and helping to put them up.

The second way in which they’ll want to get involved is by making their favourite dishes to bring along to the party. You should really encourage clients to do this, as they will surprise you with their expertise in this area.

Whatever regional speciality a client can cook and bring along will really add to your party’s success, whilst allowing your client to feel a sense of both pride in their creation and also to really feel part of the inner sanctum of your bar and restaurant business. In the photo, you can see Seared Jumbo Scallops, wrapped in Pancetta, which was brought in by our regular customer, Dori.

People love to feel that they belong to their regular favourite drinking place.

Lastly! Don’t expect any help with the clearing up. You should have paid workers ready to do that, but I will admit that at our bar, we do have wonderful people who do muck-in and help with a lot of the clearing up, whilst both the waitresses and I do most of the washing up.