Tavern on the Green made $38.6 million in 2006.
photo: Tavern on the Green
Restaurants are a big, high-risk business. Conventional wisdom says half of all new restaurants fail in their first year. But when a restaurant hits big, boy howdy can it hit big. The top 10 grossing restaurants in America, for instance, pulled in over a quarter-billion dollars in gross food and beverage sales in 2006, according to trade magazine Restaurant & Institutions' list of top 100 independent restaurants. Newcomer Tao Las Vegas, which launched itself directly into the top spot, rang up a whopping $55.2 million in food and beverage sales in 2006. Roughly half of that came in the form of alcoholic beverages.
When it comes to these restaurant high rollers, the profits are definitely in the bottle: booze accounts for about a quarter of the top 10's revenue. In general, the trendier the venue, the bigger the bar bill. New York's fourth-place Tao, for example, makes 40% of its money from drinks – that's a lot of Tao-tinis. By contrast, only 11.5% of the sales at Illinois' more family-oriented Bob Chinn’s Crab House, which ranked seventh on the list, were from drinks.
Diners, it would seem, like to sip their cocktails in dramatic settings straight out of Hollywood movie sets (indeed, both Tao and Tavern on the Green have been featured on-screen). With the exception of Bob Chinn's Crab House, all of the top restaurants received very good or better Decor ratings from Zagat surveyors, with Tao in New York rated highest followed by Tavern on the Green – which sits inside New York's Central Park.
Size also matters – though the smallest restaurant in the top 10, New York's 21 Club, has 150 dining room seats, the average dining room size for these heavyweights is 395. The biggest of them, Bob Chinn's Crab House, can seat 650 people in its dining room and 100 at its bar.
Service, however, didn't appear to have as great an impact on the rankings. New York's 21 Club, which came in 10th with $19.5 million in sales, served our surveyors best, reflected in its 24 Service score. The rest of the top 10 only averaged a 20 (Tavern on the Green had the lowest Service score, a 16).
And while good food didn't seem to hurt a restaurant's ranking, a middling Zagat Food score didn't exclude it from the top 10. While nine of the restaurants rated 20 or above for Food, the unstoppable Tavern on the Green rated a mere 14. Yet it still managed to nab second place on the list with more than $38 million in sales, only 21% of which came from booze.
Which spot garnered the highest Zagat Food score? That would be Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami Beach. The restaurant, which got a 26 for Food, came in third on the list with $28 million in sales, despite being closed from August till mid-October each year.