The Great Outdoors

Café 976 is so close to the beach, you’ll see grains of sand still falling from the shoes of patrons sitting on the outdoor patio. Located in San Diego’s Pacific Beach neighborhood, the café is in a 1920s-era house that was remodeled 15 years ago to its current incarnation. The 976 has limited seating indoors, but its outdoor area includes a patio and garden with 30 to 40 tables.

With spring approaching, the time is right to consider opening your doors to outside seating. Though your local climate will likely dictate how feasible it is to accommodate customers in the elements, adjustments such as heaters, fans or covered areas can help you provide an outdoor option nearly any time of year.

And having a place to seat customers beyond the confines of your café can allow you to welcome another population of guests, dogs, with the combination of fresh air and canine companionship adding another dimension to your service.

Some places are blessed with natural beauty, making it easy to create ambient outdoor seating. At Dr. Tea’s Tea Garden & Herbal Emporium, the teahouse opens up to a 5,000-square-foot backyard patio and garden area. This kind of space would be welcome at any shop, but it’s especially rare in Los Angeles’ urban jungle. “We’ve got a location second to none, really, in L.A.,” says owner Mark Ukra.

The Tea Garden opened in 1988, but Ukra didn’t take it over until 2005. The garden he inherited includes a fountain and about 25 tables and chairs, many of which are sectioned off into different nooks and crannies. “What I’ve done is carved out with bamboo different seating areas within the garden,” he says. “People can hibernate in their own little area surrounded by bamboo with privacy.” Ukra says the quiet environment entices customers looking to get work done. “Many writers in L.A. come to our store to write,” he says. “I know one gentleman has written three feature films in our garden.”

Café 976’s former life as a house made its accompanying modest garden a natural extension of the shop. “The fact that it’s an old house makes us a little bit unique,” says general manager Kate Grimes. “We have a lot of flowers and vegetation around, so when you’re in our garden, even though we’re on a main street, it feels like you’re away from the street.” Retailers can take note that both Dr. Tea’s and Café 976 don’t rely solely on nature—they employ gardeners to sculpt the scenery. “We have a gardener that comes once or twice a month,” says Grimes. “She plants different blooms at different times of the year. She spends a lot of time on it.”

Another way to create outdoor beauty is to manufacture it yourself. At Iron Mutt Coffee Co. in the Portland, Ore., suburb of Beaverton, owner Sean Daugherty’s lease provided him with about 1,000 square feet of outside space. Positioning his café as a dog-friendly space, he landscaped the outdoor area to create a welcoming environment. “I asked the landlord, ‘How would you mind me landscaping and fencing in this area?’” he says. “He was on board with it. I’m spending my own money to beautify the place, and it helps me but it also helps him, and it utilizes basically dead space.” In addition to the landscaping and fencing, Daugherty added a tiled patio, cedar-chip bark and six stationary tables.

While greenery and landscaping can help attract customers to an outdoor seating area, they aren’t always necessary. There’s a lot to be said for the appeal of simply being outside; at The Roast Coffeehouse in Salisbury, Conn., owner Joe Jaklitsch says it’s the weather more than the atmosphere that lures people to his outdoor tables. “We don’t really add too much to it,” he says. “It’s just that people see people there, and if it’s a nice day, they tend to just want to be outside.” Like the 976 Café, The Roast Coffeehouse has limited seating indoors, so the four tables and 16 seats out front give it much-needed additional room for customers.

However, because The Roast is in the often-frosty climate of Connecticut, Jaklitsch puts out portable tables from March to November, approximately—though Mother Nature dictates the exact dates. “As soon as the snow melts and it gets a little warm, we start putting the tables and chairs up,” he says. “And then when it gets to be too chilly, we pull them in.”

The Western U.S. benefits from milder temperatures that can allow for year-round outdoor seating. At Dr. Tea’s, Ukra adds heaters to the garden during the winter, but he says customers who sit outside tend to stay on the covered deck. At Iron Mutt, Daugherty says cold-weather customers will bundle up and still sit outside, they just won’t stay as long. “We get customers with their Timberlands and their Columbia jackets, and they’ll go outside,” he says. “It’s not as much of a sit-down-and-relax-for-an-hour kind of thing, it’s more of a 10- to 15-minute thing.”

ACCOMMODATING MAN'S BEST FRIEND
Cafés are a natural place for customers to bring their dogs, and retailers are increasingly catering to dog owners. At Iron Mutt, in addition to the large outdoor seating area that can accommodate up to a dozen dogs, there is a wall where customers can post pictures of their pets, an array of dog-related merchandise, and animal murals and portraits. Owner Daugherty and his wife, Rachelle, are dog lovers, and they believe Portland is “one of the most dog-friendly cities in the nation, and one of the most caffeinated cities,” he says. “Our whole idea was just to give people a place to bring their dogs as they’re walking the neighborhood— get some coffee, relax and socialize.”

THE CHARITABLE SIDE OF DOG FRIENDLINESS
Not every retailer has either the capacity or the desire to make their café dog-friendly. But for those that do, catering to them can lead to surprising networking opportunities. “For us, it’s opened a lot of doors to events and organizations that wouldn’t necessarily be directly related to a coffeehouse,” says Sean Daugherty, owner of Iron Mutt Coffee Co. in Beaverton, Ore. The dog-themed café has become a natural venue for monthly meetings of several pet-related organizations. During the summer, Iron Mutt hosts the Northwest Greyhound Association’s monthly “adopt-a-dog events.” And the shop does regular fund-raisers for Portland-area animal shelters and hospitals.

Coffee wholesalers can consider offering a blend whose proceeds benefit a pet-related cause. Diana Lacey, vice president of sales at Portland’s Kobos Coffee, spearheaded the release of Kobos’ Best Friend Blend about four years ago. The blend’s label features a picture of Lacey’s departed dog Lucy, and is sold both at Kobos and at the Humane Society, with a portion of proceeds benefiting the Humane Society.

The Daughertys are also serving a demographic with above-average disposable income. According to the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association, 63 percent of U.S. households own a pet, and Americans spent $41.2 billion on their pets in 2007. The Iron Mutt serves this crowd, not only with coffee, but with dog-related merchandise including stickers and T-shirts. Indeed, the dog merchandise market is booming, with other products including gourmet pet treats like dog pizza, and even non-alcoholic, beef-flavored dog beer. The Iron Mutt also has more traditional, complimentary dog offerings like biscuits and water, but Daugherty says they decided against throwing a pile of toys in the seating area. “Some dogs, even though they’re well socialized, once they latch onto a toy, it’s their toy,” he says.

Dog socialization is a relevant issue at any café that welcomes canines. At The Roast Coffeehouse, Jaklitsch says dogs interact routinely without problems. “Once in a while they’ll growl at each other, but mostly everybody has their dog on a leash, so they tend to take care of that.” Indeed, owners are in charge of making sure their dogs behave, and most tend to live up to that responsibility. “People who bring their dogs to a dog-friendly coffee shop know if their dogs get along well with others or not,” says Daugherty. “If they don’t, they typically don’t want to expose their dogs or themselves, liability-wise, to a potentially volatile situation.”
   
To ensure that the outside seating area remains a happy place, the Iron Mutt also posts a friendly reminder: “We’ve got a sign on the gate when you walk in,” says Daugherty. “It says, ‘Please, Only Happy Dogs and Happy People,’ because usually dogs are a reflection of their people.”

As for dogs venturing inside of cafés, because most municipalities have health codes that ban animals inside foodservice establishments, it’s something that may never happen. “I’d love to be able to see dogs get inside cafés and places, but the health codes are against it,” says Diana Lacey, vice president of sales at Portland’s Kobos Coffee. “It’s going to be a hard run against the health department.” Still, persistent dog-loving customers who don’t want to leave their mutt outside lead some owners to allow the occasional dog into the shop. One retailer said the health department cited him about 10 years ago for allowing dogs inside his shop, but in keeping customers happy, he still has not banned dogs from coming indoors.

For information on how to make your outside area more appealing to the four-legged set, dogfriendly.com has tips for businesses, including coffeehouses.

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