Starting this week, Drafts Sports Bar & Grill will no longer have a separate off-sale space. Instead, they are changing the area to become a private room for customers to use for meetings, parties, etc.
Since Drafts opened, customers have asked if they had a separate private room for hosting meetings, groom’s dinners, baby showers, bridal showers, birthday parties, and more. “We’re turning the current space into a meeting room that can seat 25 to 30 people,” Drafts owner Brent Melsa explained. “We’re going to have a nice electric fireplace for the ambiance, lights on dimmers, possibly add a projector screen for presentations, a large screen TV, and our builder Gary from DeBoer Builders, built little countertops so we can do catering and chafing dishes.” Melsa shared that the room can also be used for overflow seating if the restaurant is filled with people and help them set up a catering guide for letting customers know what they can have catered for events.
Drafts will still have off-sale available for purchase, but they will be sold at the bar. “We just felt that our off-sale before was more of a convenience off-sale, and we didn’t do a lot of business with it,” said Melsa. “It was more of a convenience thing with our customers, so we feel this will be a lot more utilized in the future. We already have five or six things booked.”
For the off-sale at the bar, a menu board will be set up with a selection of domestic beers, liquor, and wine. All purchases will be added to the customers’ check at the end of a meal. “We are going to gear more towards the craft beers, so we’ll have a lot of different things in that category. We’ll still have the main brands, but we won’t be buying as many suitcases of them,” said Melsa. “We’ll still have the off-sale here, but it will just be behind the bar, so the bartender is where individuals would want to come and ask and see what we have available.”
The remodeling project should be done by the end of March. Pictures of the room in its current state can be seen below-
