Pizza Today - April 2016 - 36

The serving system

When it comes to patio seating, your
customers' happiness depends on your
serving logistics. Here are some tips
from Sciaroni of Onesto in St. Louis:
* Back-up help is crucial. For
busier times of day, Onesto hires food
runners to speed delivery from the
kitchen to outside diners. And bussers
are on hand for cleanup, even though
servers also pre-bus their tables.

* Manage beverages with a patio
server station. Onesto's "station"

includes a bus tub, a cooler of water and
ice and "things they'll need for every
table," Sciaroni says. "At our outside
station, we have tea and water, but
right inside is our bar, where we have
two soda fountains and the rest of the
beverages."
* Keep it simple. That includes
everything from drinking glasses, to the
cutlery, to the servers' attire. To avoid
breaking glasses on patio concrete,
Onesto's uses plastic cups. And a casual
employee dress code -- shorts with
Onesto's T-shirts -- keeps servers cool
on steamy summer days. (Sciaroni notes
that she never has to twist servers' arms
to volunteer for patio duty. Usually they
request it.)
The seating demand

Be prepared for people to prefer patio
seating over your interior dining room.
That translates into longer waiting
times for customers to dine al fresco,
unless you carefully plan ahead. For
example, Onesto doubled its outdoor
seating from 30 to 60 a few years ago.
The indoor dining room has 60 seats,
plus a private dining room that seats 20.
However, even at that, wait times for
patio dining can be an hour or longer,
Sciaroni says. In those instances, Onesto gives customers a choice between an
inside table or the wait.
Capitalize on "green" areas. Everyone
enjoys sitting on the grass on a pleasant
day to have a picnic lunch, Puleo says.
A focal point of his place is the outlying
grassy area, for customers to spread
blankets and enjoy meals with a bottle
3 6 / P I Z Z AT O D AY. C O M / A P R I L 2 0 1 6

of wine.
"The patio is near the front entrance,
and there's a nice green area, a small
park, that combines with the patio basically. A lot of activities for families go
on there. You can see the kids playing.
It works great," Puleo says. "This is the
way I envisioned it. This was the only
building that I would have considered
for this very reason."
The ambiance

The mood you create on your patio
is just as important as the one you set
indoors, says Friedman of Pizza Delicious. He and his business partner, Greg
Augarten, decided the cost of ambience
was worth customer loyalty. They spent
up to $30,000 on their patio, and more
upgrades are on the way. They can seat
30 outside.
"It was a significant investment, but
we knew it was something we needed.
We just had inside seating before and
were bursting at the seams," Friedman
says.
Friedman and Augarten have a good
friend who designed their interior
booths. For the patio, he built six customized wood tables. Benches, with the
same design as the wood tables, were
built into a concrete wall barrier. The
effect is a long, cohesive dining space.
Small light globes, strung overhead,
glitter across the tabletops.
"We have it designed to be attractive
at night. It's intimate and cozy even
though it's outside. That's fun. You're in
your own little world out there, and also
it's good space-wise," Friedman says.
"People can stand out there and be
less in the way. Birthday parties come

to the restaurant, and we don't have
a gigantic space indoors, but people
find their own seats and spread out a
bit more. They grab a beer and a slice
and are not standing in the middle of
an indoor restaurant. They can lounge
about, be less formal, and we can pack
more people in." n
HEIDI LYNN RUSSELL specializes in
writing about the issues that affect
small business owners. She is a regular
contributor to Pizza Today and lives in
Lexington, Kentucky.

Smoke on the Wind
Do you have a plan for smokers on a
crowded patio?
Every community is different. For
example, smokers cannot come within
100 feet from the front door of a restaurant in St. Louis, says Sally Sciaroni,
manager of Onesto Pizza & Trattoria.
"Since our patio surrounds our front
door, when we see someone smoking, we
politely ask them to put their cigarette out
or to step off of the patio," she says.
Mike Friedman, co-owner of Pizza
Delicious in New Orleans, notes: "There's
not much we can do about this since it's
outside. On occasion, a customer has
mentioned to staff that they are bothered
by cigarette smoke, and we've nicely
asked the smoking customer if they can
walk out of the immediate seating area to
finish his/her cigarette, which has worked
out well."
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