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When I showed up for dinner in late January at Zebulon’s Southwestern Grill and Tequileria at the Marriott hotel, what I found was the biggest smoking, multicar culinary train wreck I’ve ever seen.
The tequila-specific bar had almost no tequila. The servers knew almost nothing about the food. Two hours of long waits and mediocre, overpriced plates started with the server spilling water on our menus and not mopping it up, and stumbled into a landscape of goofs and gaffs so ridiculous they had me looking around for the hidden camera. The server called the rustic Italian ciabatta bread Chewbacca bread. He arrived with a tray of tequila shots no one had ordered. He did a Macarena-like jig while singing in Spanish when we ordered the Tres Leches cake, then came back with the wrong dessert. When he was explaining the nightly specials, his cell phone rang, and he answered it.
When I found out later that the place had been open only a week, I shelved what had been a less-than-warm-andfuzzy review. It deserved time to find its feet. But last week I went back, and had an almost identical experience, minus the zany waiter.
Zebulon’s occupies a stylish corner of the hotel with tall ceilings, comfy booths, and warm red and yellow walls ranged around a central arrangement of cactus and fountains. It would have looked invitingly hip if on a recent Friday night there had been more than one other occupied table.
When the people at that table saw the hostess bringing us by, they practically pounced on her.
“Please,” a woman said through clenched teeth. “It’s been an hour. My mother would just like some vanilla ice cream.”
“Long wait, huh,” I said. She rolled her eyes.
It wasn’t a good start.
The scattered, not-very-Southwestern menu has changed some since my last visit, but still offers some of the real dogs I thought were mistakes in January, as well as some new ones. The shiitakecrusted salmon in mole ($19.95), which sounds weirdly intriguing, is slathered in a sauce that tastes like little more than salty baker’s chocolate. The seasoned, yellow rice in an ambitious paella heaped with a mix of mussels, sea scallops and shrimp with a hint of chorizo ($24.95) had improved from January’s soupy version, but a quartet of mealy, pungent mussels seemed to be past their prime. Never order mussels in a place with low turnover.

gazette.com

Draw a Crowd
When it comes to promoting St. Patrick’s Day, most Irish bar owners agree that little needs to be done.
“It promotes itself, really,” says Brandi Simpson, general manager of O’Malleys on Fourth in Tucson, Arizona. “All you have to do is have a [bar] name that’s Irish and know how to throw a good party.”
Since opening the bar in 1993, owners Brian and Scott Cummings have learned that the St. Patrick’s Day crowd quadruples the sales of a normal busy night, with next to no advertising fueling the draw.
Hanafin agrees that little marketing is necessary, but that doesn’t keep him from coming up with new ideas each year to ensure a crowd. This year he helped coordinate the first New London Irish Parade to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. The parade will conclude in front of his pub.
“We’re expecting 500 to 600 people to walk through our doors that day because of the parade,” Hanafin adds.
Shaun Clancy, owner of Foley’s NY Pub & Restaurant in New York, goes the more traditional route by starting the celebration early, a tactic bar owners use to remind patrons of the St. Patrick’s Day revelry to come. This year, Foley’s held a pre-party called Foleyoke–Irish karaoke night– where customers won a free Guinness beer for singing a traditional Irish song.
Honor the ‘Motherland’
A major boost in business for bars comes from offering traditional Irish food and drink specials. Items like corned beef and cabbage dinners, Irish breakfasts and Irish stews, are just some of the customary fare customers look to purchase on St. Patrick’s Day.
Adding these items to his menu allows Clancy to nearly double his business’s food sales. The traditional dinners are so popular, he projects he’ll sell nearly 200 pounds of corned beef in one business day.
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In addition to Irish food and drink specials, O’Malleys honors Ireland by hiring a bagpipe band to snake its way through the crowd and play traditional Irish folk songs. The yearly tradition is just one of the many customs O’Malleys patrons look forward to every St. Patrick’s Day.
Such a major increase in customers is great for business–if it’s managed correctly. To accommodate the crowd, O’Malleys adjoins the parking lot with a 40-foot by-100-foot tent outside to hold four extra bars and a stage for live music. Security on St. Patrick’s Day goes from a team of eight to 22, with additional 24-hour security patrolling the perimeter of the tent.

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