JOIN USSet to serve till late hours
While the City is excited about the extension of the deadline till 1 am, pub and restaurant owners have come out with mixed reactions and are preparing accordingly. They talk to Metrolife about their plans for the change in nightlife.
Neil Peres, a partner of ‘The Grill House’, Ulsoor, says that they are thinking of adding more security guards. “We will have to add more trained security guards and are also looking for more space in the parking lot for
additional vehicles.”
“We have never used bouncers but are contemplating hiring some as some people are bound to get ‘extra happy’. We’ll also have to add more staff in the kitchen and dining area to serve more people,” he adds.
Others like Santosh Martin, director of Skyye Bar, UB City, are going to see how people respond to the deadline and plan accordingly. “We plan to add more bouncers for the weekends and have spoken to the UB City management about increasing the valet parking facilities,” says Santosh. He adds that they are also figuring out how much the neighbours will be affected by this change and for how long the music can be on.
Amit Roy, one of the partners of Blimey, an Irish pub in 1 MG Mall and Stomp, an old school classic rock pub in Forum Value Mall, says that the provisions for pubs in malls vary from the stand-alone ones. “I’m not worried about the need for more parking space as the malls anyway have that.
In the case of ‘Blimey’, since there’s a rooftop too, I need to check about the volume levels since we need to serve the customers as well as the people around. There will be extra staff added to different pubs and we will also be adding more bouncers. We already have cameras installed at most points. Thus we’re covered that way,” details Amit.
He adds that the first few weeks will be interesting, after which the City will adjust to the extended timings and adjust their schedule accordingly. “In the beginning, there might be people who will come in and drink till late in the night, but slowly, they will start planning and start drinking later on,” says Amit.
There are some pubs which will be waiting for the official notice to come from the excise department to start preparations. Pecos manager Elongoven states, “We will wait for the document to come and till then, we will go by the 11.30 pm deadline itself.”
While pub owners are excited about this change, restaurant owners are looking at the change in deadline differently. Nirmala Balakrishnan, who runs the family restaurant ‘Under The Mango Tree’, at Richmond Town, says that she will shut the restaurant by
11 pm as she did till now. “Since mine is a dining joint in a residential area, there is a typical time that people come in to have dinner. I will continue to go by the old deadline,” she said. Nirmala adds that she would probably have considered the deadline extension if she was in a prime area.
But even restaurants in prime areas aren’t as excited about the deadline extension. Krishna Shantakumar, general manager of Ebony restaurant on MG Road, says that he’s more worried about how his staff will get back home. “Also, people in Bangalore don’t dine that late. It’s a good thing that the government has given the owners the right to keep restaurants open for long, but it’s not clear how many restaurants would like to extend their services for that long. There haven’t been proper talks yet, but I plan to keep Ebony open for an extra 30 minutes only,” he says.
In respect to the pub ‘13th Floor’, Krishna says that not much in terms of infrastructure needs to be added. “We will extend services till 1 am. But we can’t make many hard plans for just the trial period of three months,” he wraps up.