Saskia Spanhoff
Emelie Alton
Mike Johnson and Skylar Johnson
Bryan Messina
Khalid Saleh
What makes your outdoor dining area unique?We have an outdoor parklet in front of the restaurant decorated with planters with culinary herbs and edible flowers. It’s a very comfortable space that customers tell us feels like Europe. It’s got some tree canopy, and there’s a view of a mural right across the street.
We were already working on the parklet, so the timing was perfect when COVID-19 hit. It has the ability to seat about 38. Because we’re able to seat a lot of people outside, we’ve kept things very spread out inside.
People absolutely love it. Sitting outside changes their energy and makes them feel more relaxed. It’s like a respite.
We purchased a few heaters and will add a few more.
At Bistro Byronz Willow Grove, we have two- and four-tops that wrap around the building, and at Pizza Byronz, we have a courtyard. At the Mid City Byronz, we have an outdoor patio. These are all permanent outdoor spaces, but since COVID-19 we’ve also added a parking lot patio at Mid City to give diners more outdoor seating.
For us, it’s been about adapting quickly and trying to give everyone the experience they want while following the protocols. Some diners prefer to order takeout, and others only feel comfortable eating outside. Others are thrilled to be able to eat inside, so it just depends.
Very positive. A large portion of the population wants to eat outdoors. At Pizza Byronz, for example, we’ve had nights where we’re 75% full outside and 25% inside.
We’ve been working on different strategies, including portable heaters, for each of these different outdoor layouts.
We’ve got tables and chairs in our parking lot spread more than 10 feet apart. The tables are two tops that can be converted to four tops. The parking lot has shade during the day on one part, so we move the tables there, and we also have an awning.
We pushed back where people can park, and there’s two rows of tables in the front of our gravel lot.
We’re going to stay where we’re at. We want people to feel safe, and we have enough tables inside to meet our quota. We used to have 13 tables inside, and now we have nine.
People are enjoying it. We have a lot of older customers—some people have been coming here for 33 years—and they’ll come and sit in the gravel lot, just so no one will get too close to them.
We wanted a tent atmosphere. We used part of our parking lot since we don’t have a lot of space inside. We wanted to make the tent as nice as possible, so we got greenery and plants, and put a bunch of picnic tables out there. We hung some LSU banners so it doesn’t feel like you’re sitting in a parking lot. We wanted to get the tailgate vibe, too, so people can sit outside and watch the game.
Oh yeah, it’s the perfect time of year right now. The weather couldn’t be better for outdoor dining.
Our goal is to keep it up until we ride out the virus. For the foreseeable future, the outdoor dining space is staying out there.
We do have tent walls coming in. We have a company installing some heating. We’re going to get it turned into an indoor dining hall.
We were inspired by the ambiance of courtyards in Mexico, so we incorporated a tiled fountain with a flower bed. It eliminates noise from the road and gives diners privacy. The tiles were imported from Mexico, and they’re all hand crafted. We have multicolored twinkle lights overhead, which we change seasonally—at Christmas, they’re red and green, and during the Fourth of July, they’re blue, red and white.
We have seen more people want to sit outside than inside. We can seat up to 65 people outside.
We are planning to add more heaters. We’ll do our yearly Christmas decorations. We always put up a tree and reindeer. We try to keep it elegant but as festive as possible at the same time.
Fajitas. They come on a sizzling skillet, and our tortillas are hot and fresh. Our homemade tortilla soup is also popular in the wintertime.
We have a side patio that usually stays pretty full. I’ll still [book] live music out there depending on the day, so it still sort of feels like normal, even though it’s not 100%.
We have definitely had more takeout. We also sold more gallon margaritas to-go than I have since I opened.
I have a person who comes and sanitizes the restaurant twice a week, and we all wear our masks. Because of COVID, I’m thinking about redoing our patio to have it a bit more covered—because if it rains, it messes everything up.
This article was originally published in the December 2020 issue of 225 Magazine.
