LITTLE ROCK — Whether it is a patio area tacked onto the side of the building for a smoking area or a clear spot along a sidewalk beckoning pedestrians to sit down and relax, outdoor seating has become an important part of many restaurants' business.
Arkansas' temperate climate lends itself well to enjoying the outdoors. Only a few weeks in the dead of winter or the blazing summer can drive most clients indoors, restaurateurs say.
But modern advancements such as patio heaters, watercooled fans, elaborate tents and heavy, clear plastic curtains can keep Mother Nature at bay even when she is at her worst.
Kirby Walker, owner of Noodles Italian Kitchen in Fayetteville, said the changing seasons make the 90-seat patio that was opened in December very popular.
"When the weather is good, and especially in spring and autumn, there is a dramatic push for the patio," Walker said.
Montine McNulty, executivedirector of the Arkansas Hospitality Association, is quick to point out that a trend toward outdoor dining can be linked to the change in smoking laws in Arkansas last year. Smoking is banned inside restaurants or clubs that admit people under the legal smoking age of 18. Most restaurant owners moved the smoking section outside where law allows it.
Neal Crawford, owner of Dickson Street icon Jose's Streetside, said the smoking laws first enacted by Fayetteville on March 10, 2004, and later adopted by the state have pushed some customers outside.
"Outdoor dining season has become more popular since then. But there is also an energy people enjoy when they sit outside. They watch the people walking and driving by," Crawford said.
Annika Stensson, media relations manager for the National Restaurant Association, said outdoor dining is attractive to restaurant operators because it can expand the number of seats - and the amount of business - a restaurant can do throughout the year.
Fall brings a big increase in weekend traffic to Eureka Springs and to John Wiley's The New Delhi restaurant. Foliage tours bring the crowds to the Ozark Mountains and they have to have somewhere to eat, he said.
Wiley added a patio at the side of the little 35-seat North Main Street restaurant this year, increasing the seating capacity to between 75 and 80.
"Two-thirds of my business is outside in beautiful weather," he said.
Little Rock's Cheers in the Heights opened in 1979, but didn't add the patio until the mid-1990s, current owner Chris Tanner said. The Van Buren Street restaurant can seat 50 people indoors and 25 outdoors.
Tanner said he added the roof over the outdoor dining and lined it with overhead ceramic heaters and clear curtains to expand the time it could be used.
"Once it gets to about 40 degrees, most people stop wanting to sit out there. But there are some people who still like beingout there. They just wear heavy jackets," he said.
They like it so much that when Tanner added a retractable awning over a parking space to the side of the patio to provide a waiting area, people began asking to sit there, he said.
He estimated that about a third of his business is generated from the patio area, an amount equal to the distribution of seats.
Walker said he didn't track the amount of business the patio attracts to Noodles, but said it does help sales volume. The restaurant seats 275; the patio adds 90.
"How much it adds is hard to measure," he said. "But it does allow us to compete better."
Renting out the patio for private parties and events also helps the rest of the business, Walker said.
"It is a business in itself, that's how we look at it," he said. "It does generate business for us and we are very pleased with it."
Tanner said almost every restaurant is adding outdoor seating, but wouldn't attribute it to the smoking laws.
"Everyone is doing patios and adding heaters and everything. It makes more seats that can be used for a longer time in parts of the year. That means more money at a time when you usually wouldn't have any generated from that area," he said.
Crawford said the patio is the business for Jose's Streetside.
"It can make or break me. If I didn't have it, I would be broke," he said.
The Arkansas Hospitality Association and the National Restaurant Association don't keep statistics on outdoor seating at restaurants.
Another draw to the outdoor areas is entertainment, particularly live music. The New Delhi, Noodles and Jose's Streetside alloffer live music on certain nights of the week.
"How much it helps depends on the quality of the music. Even when the temperature is up to 100 degrees, the patio can be packed," Wiley said. "We've even had to pull people out of the street."
But music can attract something restaurants don't want, like complaints from neighbors about the noise.
The Ozark Mountain Smokehouse on Dickson Street doesn't have much outdoor dining, just a couple of picnic tables near the street. But it does offer the Garden Room for private events. Garden Room Manager Julie Meisch said the event space can sit 130 comfortably inside and handle 250 with the outdoor patio.
But nearby homeowners complained about the noise level coming from the events hosted in the Garden Room.
Although the facility has a Dickson Street address in the entertainment district of Fayetteville, because it touches the residential area, the allowed sound level is lower than that for other outdoor venues in the same district like Jose's.
"We can only have about 60 decibels, and that makes having any type of music difficult," Meisch said. "But we made some changes that redirected the sound and reached a mutual agreement with our neighbors."
Wiley said The New Delhi didn't face any opposition to the patio because the town is trying to revitalize the north end of Main Street.
"It made a dead space an open, living space," he said of the patio.
Tanner didn't face any opposition from neighbors, but he did have to correct a mistake that could have killed the patio.
"When I was covering the patio, I went before the city like I was supposed to and found out the patio was illegal. The people who built it didn't get permission; they just did it," he said.
Business Matters, Pages 83, 85 on 10/07/2007