As restaurants continue to cope with restrictions and a curfew soon to be put in place. Something you may start to see more of is parklets or extended outdoor dining.

NBC Palm Springs spoke to businesses hoping to make it through the holiday season using this innovative idea. Johannes Restaurant in Palm Springs was closed for 10 months due to covid restrictions and weather conditions, but ownership has now turned to new ideas to try and attract customers.

“With the parklet, we just really hope that we’ll be able to capture the loss we have on the inside and capture at least the outside parklet,” said Johannes Bacher, Owner of Johannes Restaurant.

Johannes also shares the tremendous loss his restaurant has faced.

“It’s been very painful financially, I lost over $800,000 in sales, and I’m a small potato,” explained Bacher.

At night the outside parklet turns into a beautiful ambiance for customers, but Johannes says that comes with a price.

“It’s very expensive to do because you don’t want to have it cheesy, you want to make a nice impression for my customers, so they’re not sitting on a parking lot,” said Bacher.

And other businesses are jumping in on the idea too.

“What inspired us is that we have a new chef-partner as I said Tig, and we want to highlight all of the wonderful foods that he is able to make for us,” said Dennis Costa, Co-owner of Bouschet.

Some may know Bouschet for their speakeasy lounge, but for now, business owners are gearing up for outdoor dining and bracing for a new curfew.

“Our service time is already shortened as it is, basically we cannot take any reservations past 8’oclock because my customers normally sit here for an hour and a half,” explained Bacher.

“We’re just going to work through it as best we can, I know it’s going to be for the whole month, basically the whole month of December. the last reservations will be at like 8:30 so that we can get people out by 9:30 and honor the curfew,” said Costa.

Businesses Turn To Parklet Dining To Attract Customers