Our vision for The Listening Room at 443 has always been to create a welcoming space where music lovers of all ages could enjoy excellent live performances. We are, after all, a coffee house and while we have a bar, we certainly aren’t the typical late night pub. Our focus is on acoustic shows that happen early in the evening rather than late night shenanigans and we wrap things up by 10 or 11pm depending on the day.
Because of this, we have always allowed children of all ages (including infants) to attend our shows. Many of our artists have young children themselves and appreciate being able to bring the whole family to an early performance. Some of our artists happen to have a lot of children who are huge fans, and we LOVE seeing school age kids so enthusiastic about music.
But while we like the concept of hosting guests pre-school age to 80+, the reality turned out to be a little more complicated.
We started noticing that many of our guests were a little put off by having young children running around in a bar setting. We were getting comments and it wasn’t positive. Nobody was rude, but it was clearly making people uncomfortable.
As we were discussing how to handle it, we had an incident over the weekend that prompted us to officially change our stance on the issue.
We had someone attend one of our shows over the weekend with 3 children who were probably all between 7-12 years old. He parked them in one of our living room areas and then went to another part of the room to visit with friends. The kids were bored and clearly not interested in being there. We had a full house that night and we watched several couples enter the bar and struggle to find somewhere sit or stand while one of our prime seating areas was occupied by 3 very unhappy children. Eventually, one of the children approached the bar and asked me if I knew where her daddy was. I knew what he looked like and it still took me several minutes to locate him because he was sitting at the very back table with his back to the room. I knew the kids were there, but hadn’t realized they were completely unattended until I had a scared little girl asking me to help find her parent in a packed bar.
The potential for something bad happening was terrifying and the liability implications were breathtaking. What if one of the kids wandered out the door and down Burnet Ave? What if someone with less than pure intentions lured the kids out of the cafe and into his creeper van? What if one of them hurt themselves? With our vintage furniture and fragile tchotchkes strewn everywhere, we are certainly not a child-proof environment. We kept an eye on the kids as best we could while also trying to manage a very busy bar night.
After a lot of discussion amongst our staff and surveying friends and customers, we have made the decision not to allow children in the bar after 4pm. After 4pm you must be 18 or older, and obviously at least 21 to drink. Our Wine & Whiskey Happy Hour begins at 4pm and we shift things to more of a lounge environment at that point. It makes me a little sad that we can’t accommodate the children of our artists or young kids who are real fans, but last weekend was a sneak peek into would could potentially go wrong, and our adult guests coming in for happy hour or an evening show definitely have an expectation of the bar being a kid-free zone.
This was not an easy decision, but I hope our guests understand why we felt it necessary to make this change.
