What We Did on Our Summer Vacation

Remember when you were a kid starting a new school year, and you had to write an essay about what you did on your summer vacation?

Well, this blog post is the 443 version of that annual back-to-school tradition.

Instead of lounging at the beach, camping, or even just relaxing on our break, we overhauled our food and cocktail menus, the basement, our food prep area, and the server stations. We deep-cleaned and made repairs. We reimagined what is possible with our tiny music room.

Whew… I. AM. TIRED. 

After five and a half years of pivoting, adjusting, and evolving, the 443 bears little resemblance to the business we opened in 2019.

In those early days, we were a coffee house by day, we featured live music at night, and our room was furnished with funky vintage couches and chairs. We hosted book clubs and experimented with music trivia nights. Sometimes we were even open as a “regular” bar.

(It was so pretty… sigh. I do miss the couches sometimes.)

We’ve always tried to make the most of our limited space, but there is only so much you can do, you know? The square footage is what it is.

It’s no secret how frustrated I’ve been with our limitations on Burnet Ave. Our food prep area and storage were almost non-existent, which made day-to-day functioning a massive challenge. Getting food out to customers and keeping track of what we did and didn’t have on hand felt like a Herculean task.

We didn’t have a green room, which isn’t the end of the world, but it IS something touring artists expect. Not to mention, it’s more convenient to have the band tucked out of the way somewhere while the entire room is filling up in a 30-minute time frame and we’re getting our asses handed to us.

(It’s uncanny… when the bartender pulls a waterfall of 18 drink tickets off the printer and every staff member is running around like crazy, that seems to be the moment our visiting musicians decide they need to head to the bar with an urgent need for a cocktail)

We are working in a space that wasn’t designed for our current business model… and it was discouraging and exhausting.

I have been casually hunting for a building better suited to our needs since COVID-19 days and more actively for the last year. Increasing our capacity would be nice, but the more significant issue was finding a place with all the infrastructure to help us run efficiently, with less wear and tear on our staff.

But then two things happened this summer that sparked a domino effect of much-needed updates on Burnet Ave:

1. We unexpectedly gained more space in the basement! Our landlord used most of the basement as his workshop and didn’t allow musicians downstairs. He got married and moved out of the building recently, taking most of his tools to the new house. He gave us the main room down there – which we didn’t see coming – and suddenly, we had some real estate to work with.
2. We had a small ice machine tucked behind the bar, but it wasn’t big enough to keep up with our current level of business. Also, it wasn’t getting enough ventilation in the spot we had it, so it kept breaking down… AND there is a critical shortage of companies in Syracuse that work on these things. I literally could not find anyone to come out and service it. So, when it stopped working for the millionth time, I decided to find a better use for the area and yanked it out.

(If you know a high school kid who doesn’t know what to do with their life… encourage them to go to trade school for HVAC. SERIOUSLY. )

Gaining 3′ of space behind the bar might not seem like a big deal, but one lesson I’ve learned over the last 5 years is that the 443 is a game of inches. Every nook and cranny needs to be optimized.

I added a 3’x3′ stainless steel prep table with a couple of shelves, which immediately created a dedicated place for our flatbread pizzas when they came out of the oven. Then, we removed an existing shelf that was sitting just above the table and added a new one higher up, which opened up the area and gave us even more usable space.

This simple move more than doubled our food prep space. We still don’t have a proper kitchen, but this update is positively life-changing.

That water spigot is a leftover from our coffee house phase when we had to fill up a 5-gallon cold brew container, but these days, the servers use it to fill water pitchers. It was located on the right side of the table, just inches away from the hot pizza ovens. Moving it to the other side made it way more convenient and a lot safer too.

I added a dedicated printer to our point-of-sale setup just for food tickets. The food tickets were coming up on the main printer located behind the food dude/dudette, and once the band started, it was impossible to hear when a new one came in. They just had to be in the habit of checking it regularly.

Now, the machine will be directly in their line of sight… a HUGE improvement.

As this project was happening, we were lucky to hire a new food dude who was WILDLY overqualified for our little music venue. He has taken charge of our food offerings.

(WOOOO-HOOOOO!)

Chef Dan attended culinary school and spent 20+ years honing his skills in NYC, including at the Harlem Dinosaur BBQ and the acclaimed cocktail bar Death & Company in the East Village. He returned to Syracuse to help care for a family member.

(FUN FACT: Dan grew up in Lyncourt across the street from our intrepid and slightly crazy sound tech, Dave Kane)

Dan is used to tiny NYC kitchens, so our miniscule facilities didn’t scare him off, thankfully. We made plans to revamp the menu during our end-of-summer break, and it was a massive relief to leave the bulk of the project in his capable hands.

(We launched the new menu this week. We’re still tweaking, but I think it’s going to knock your socks off!!)

Because Dan was spearheading the menu project, I was able to devote my time and brainpower to other projects.

We’re experimenting with a couple of different dessert ideas, and for the next few weeks, we’ll be trying cakes from locally-owned Biscotti’s Bakery. This week, we had their chocolate mousse and lemon chiffon with raspberry and toasted coconut, and we’ll try something else next week.

I added a third tablet/POS station for the server working on the far side of the stage.

We’re trying to reduce the foot traffic behind the bar during service because we’ve got such a tight space. Our food people have a challenging setup, and a steady flow of people walking behind them while they have a massive knife in their hand is NOT ideal. Plus, it will cut down on servers waiting in line to ring in orders.

Since we were redoing the food menu, I decided to overhaul the rest of the menu inserts too. Going into a new season is the perfect time to freshen things up, don’t you think?

Our Mocktail and N/A beverage menu used to be a standalone piece available by request. Britt (one of our servers) asked if there was a way to incorporate it into our main menu since we’ve been selling more of them lately.

Our old menu had 3 pages and 6 views, and we didn’t feel we could sacrifice any regular pages to make room for the mocktail page. So, I found menu covers with 4 pages and 8 views, and the mocktails now live happily ever after with the rest of the regular menu.

 

I’m aware that not everything I’m sharing here was a sexy and fun public-facing project … but I geek out over newly organized workspaces that suddenly make sense and make everyone’s jobs easier, so here we are – you are officially along for the ride. 🙂 It’s incredible how a slight shift in circumstance can spark an avalanche of positive change.

When we opened in 2019, the small server station in the food pick-up area was originally intended to hold bags of coffee.

It was falling apart and didn’t work very well for the items we needed to keep on it. I found a perfectly sized bookshelf with cubbies, and it was a WAY better use of space than the old unit.

I got some plastic hardware bins to keep things organized, and they were the perfect size to corral our utensils and napkins in both service stations.

These small, boring projects might not seem like a big deal, but they make a huge difference when your crowd arrives and leaves all at once every single night. We are only open for shows, so any revenue we’re going to make has to be made in a 2-3 hour window – and most of it happens in less than an hour. Shaving a few seconds or minutes off wherever we can makes a big difference.

As a bonus, these easy, satisfying fixes got me into the mindset of rethinking and reimagining our day-to-day processes.

Onto the more exciting stuff… our merch area got a facelift!

This area has changed a lot since we opened… we started with one table and then added another. Then, I eliminated a couple of customer tables to make more room. I picked up some pegboard panels and lashed them together to create a backdrop to hang shirts and hoodies. I added a third table and then another pegboard backdrop.

(at one point, sound tech Dave talked me into putting an upright piano in that corner… it did NOT last long, LOL)

I acquired a CD holder and a couple of vinyl record holders, which our touring artists loved.

Ruthie Wharton, aka Mrs. Sauce Boss, said, “I feel so UPTOWN with these fancy display pieces!”

That positive feedback made me think about what else we could do to optimize the area for selling merch.

Merch sales are crucial for most touring artists. Musicians keep a larger percentage of the revenue on merch than with their music, and even an undersold show can produce enough merch revenue to help them get to the next gig.

This is what it looked like before the break:

I was actually quite proud of this setup. It significantly increased display space from the previous incarnation and maximized the small corner near the door we have dedicated to merch. But Miller & the Other Sinners (in my example photo) was one of the few bands who used both pegboards, and they looked kind of sad when they were empty.

I wanted to zhuzh up the area and make it less DIY-looking and a little more streamlined.

 

I traded the raw pegboard panels held together with zip ties for freestanding black metal pegboard racks. I added some chunkier wooden hangers and lightweight mannequin forms for shirts, and suddenly, it was a whole different world.

Here it is in action for the Rick Estrin show on Friday night:

We’re considering naming our mannequins: maybe Sonny and Cher, Johnny and June, or Sid and Nancy. What do you think?

One of our members, Eric Sloan, made a fantastic piece of artwork for us a while back, and I finally framed it and hung it in a place of honor above the merch area.

Speaking of merch…

Our guests have been asking for 443 merch for years, and it’s been on my radar FOREVER. I finally had a logo designed right before we went on break so we could pull the trigger and have it for the 2024 holiday season. I’m gathering quotes for t-shirts, hoodies, and caps, but look what arrived today:

I’m so excited it is finally happening!!! We’re not quite ready to ship these yet, but if you’d like one, they’ll be available at the club.

Another project in the works forever is a sign with our name for the stage backdrop. There are millions of photos and lots of videos of our live performances floating around, and it only makes sense to brand that content to help get our name out to folks who might not be familiar with us.

Isn’t it gorgeous? I LOVE IT.

I added some vertical numbers to the wooden column, too.

I reworked some of the art on the walls in the section on the far side of the stage. A few pieces had fallen off or gotten damaged, so I took advantage of our downtime to fill in and freshen up the area.

Now, about that basement…

We did A LOT of cleaning and reorganizing downstairs… it was sweaty, dirty, and, at times, disgusting.

This narrow section used to be the only part of the basement we were allowed to use for storage. As we gained more space, we decided to rethink the entire area.

When we pulled out the shelving from the wall, we found moldy, gross, old plastic attached to the side of our walk-in cooler. We removed it and cleaned everything up.

We boxed in the wall and painted it a fresh coat so it’s easily cleanable, then added a stainless steel prep table and some shelving.

This extra work surface will be invaluable as our new food menu evolves. Even just having it available to cut cake slices has been an enormous help.

No actual room to use for a green room? NO PROBLEMO!

I relocated the run of heavy shelving from our old area and put it perpendicular to the shelving running on the back wall.

In my previous life, before 443, I set up green rooms for festivals and special events. These were just tents zhuzhed up with comfy furniture and fun decor. So why not make that happen at 443?

I decided to create a “room” using a pipe and drape frame and curtains.

This was stage 1:

I put the 10′ x 10′ frame together and added heavy velvet curtains on all sides. I still have storage on the shelves behind the curtains; it’s mostly items I don’t need to access very often.

I know the curtain panels look gold, but they were an olive/avocado green in real life. I thought they were perfect until the area rug came in.

The curtains and the rug did not jive with each other AT ALL, so I exchanged them for darker moss-green panels. The new rug made a massive difference, and I found an inexpensive, small-scale faux leather sofa on Amazon.

A small round table from my attic ended up being the perfect size for a coffee table, and I had a gorgeous stash of vintage gold Syroco mirrors that looked great on the back “wall.”

I pulled a vintage chair left from our coffee house days out of storage for additional seating and grabbed an old coat tree from my house so there is a place to hang stage outfits.

Right now, I’ve got a fan running, but I have a small space heater for winter. We are running a dehumidifier and an air purifier to improve the overall air quality down there.

I added a mini fridge for beverages and a gold vintage bar cart I scored at the thrift store for snacks, stage towels, and other supplies.

The lighting is pretty rough everywhere in our building, so a nice space for our female artists to do their make-up was a high priority in this project. I’ve watched our talented ladies resort to doing their faces in the car or standing on the sidewalk using their review mirror. 🙁

I ordered a Hollywood-style mirror with adjustable lighting (and a phone charging port!),  put it on top of a funky green rattan table I found on Facebook Marketplace, and finished it off with a small velvet stool that tucks under the table.

It’s just about done… I’m on the hunt for something fun to hang over the couch, and I think that will do it. With all the velvet it kind of feels like being inside a genie bottle or a jewelry box. 🙂

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity, with many exhausting 13-hour days, but I even managed to get our fall mums in outside the front door.

Believe it or not, there are a few projects I haven’t quite completed, so I’m working on a game plan to finish them over the next couple of months. I started updating the photos on our website, but I’ve got quite a bit more work to do there, and I need to make some decisions on 443 merch.

However, I also spent time on our break training staff members to take over some of the day-to-day tasks I usually tackle. I’m hoping to take some items off my To-do list so I’m not perpetually overwhelmed and running on a hamster wheel a million hours a week trying to keep up with it all. Everything we accomplished on this break reminded me how important it is to have some freedom from managing the day-to-day to allow for creative problem-solving and brainstorming new ideas.

I would also love to devote more time to taking care of my house and spending time with my husband.

This week was an all-out sprint to the finish line to get everything buttoned up and ready to reopen. We hosted a Comedy Night on Thursday and blues harmonica legend Rick Estrin & the Nightcats on Friday. The Rick Estrin show was sold out, so it was the first significant test of our new food prep setup and menu. We had some rough patches, and not surprisingly, the tickets ran quite a lot longer than we would have liked. Our crowd was lovely and patient ( it didn’t hurt that the show was SMASHINGLY good), and we’ve got a few days off before our next performance to figure things out. This last week was physically exhausting and mentally draining, so I’m taking the weekend to relax and recover.

I think you’re fully caught up now, and we hope to see you all in person soon.

Thank you for following along!!