Bar Seating: Best Practices for Orders & Payment

[Sdaniel]

Hi everyone!

Looking for advice when handling order taking/running food to bar top seating. We are not a bar, we are a breakfast/lunch restaurant, however, we offer bar-top seating at a few of our locations. For example, at one of our locations, we have 6 bar top seats. We may seat a group of 2, 3, 4 etc. at these seats, especially on weekends when we are on a wait. How do you all handle ringing in orders for a group seated at bar tops? Currently, we use one of the bar tops, for example, B3, and ring in the entire group's order under that seat to ensure the group's order comes out at the same time, and so that they can pay for the entire bill. While that seems like the best solution, we also rely on seat #'s when running food, and with bar seats, it has become a bit confusing for our food runners to know which one is Seat 1, depending on which bar # was used.  The other issue is that if we use B3 only, but in reality, part of the group is sat at B4 and B5, those seats remain open, and if we're on a wait, that may confuse the hosts, as it will seem as if those seats are available when in reality they are not. We use Toast Tables to run our waitlist. 

Any advice is appreciated! 🙂

[Sydney042100]

@Sdaniel It looks like you're doing everything right here. The only thing I would suggest is pre-authorizing cards on one seat, but separate tabs. For example, you have 4 people at B1, check #1 is John, check #2 is Adam, check #3 is Mary, check #4 is Jane, etc... When the food runners drop the food, they can then use the guests name directly. We pre-authorize every person who sits in our bar service Tap Room, its communal style and this works well for us. 

[josh212]

You can also Ring in each order by seat as if it were a table and if ithey are sitting at seat 3 then on that check leave seats 1 and 2 blank and right on the other seats

[rcmck]

We have a large bar (35+ seats)  and do the same thing as far as putting orders in, we don't use seat numbers though, the food runner just does the 'who has what' game which isn't great but it works, most parties at the bar are 2-3 people anyway. If we did use numbers I would probably come up with a system that everyone follows not just picking any of the table numbers they are sat at. For example the table number used is seat one and the other seats are in order to the right.

Ours is first come first serve but if you normally seat the bar area you can seat a party at more than one table, so the host could seat a 3 top at bar 1 thru 3 for example  (since each seat is a table) and that should help them manage the seats a little better when on a wait.