Faye st. needs a serious streetscape makeover to include a ton more street traffic during warm months. With more summer income, follows winter investment .
Having said that, I’ve never heard of Plaza Cafe
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Only familiar to those who live in a 3 block radius that can walk in good weather. Easier parking would have extended potential customer base to infinity.
Restaurants close in suburban shopping centers too. Loss of daytime office traffic probably hurt.
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I know this might be your schtick, but easier parking is absolutely not the issue here. There’s 5+ parking decks within a few blocks. Maybe people aren’t aware it is there, but that is a separate issue.
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A lot harder to succeed downtown. Delivery drivers reject orders from downtown restaurants due to parking hassles. That’s a huge part of the business from the cheaper places especially.
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Never said it was easier to succeed downtown, but the solution to downtown restaurants not having enough customers is definitely not more available parking. It is increasing density and livability and creating a place people want to be. Increasing parking just makes it like any other strip mall anywhere.
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Do you need a coat?
I can’t help but notice your fever for convenient parking coincides colder weather.
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That damn street is cursed.
They took away the pedestrian mall and added cars. Deference to cars has already been tried.
The city needs to add more residents, not more parking spaces. Hybrid working means more folks are working from home and they are the future sustaining patrons of businesses downtown.
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Yep. Build a city people want to live in and call home and everything else will follow.
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I walk to restaurants most of the time. I try to never drive although I don’t have problems parking in downtown Raleigh. Walking is so much more pleasant and an improvement in lifestyle. You support restaurants close to where you live. You get a little exercise. You pass and speak to neighbors as you walk. You get to know the people who work at the restaurants. I love it
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And you’re moving your legs and giving your body the exercise it wants.
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As part of the pandemic response, nearly every downtown restaurant (including Plaza Cafe) has a couple of curbside parking spaces in front of it designated by the City as temporary parking for food delivery pickups.
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Good in theory but most restaurants can not rely solely on walk up traffic in downtown Raleigh. Density is not great enough. Downtown is actually busier on weekends when more residents are home verses the weekdays.
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If you’re a restaurant with a huge parking lot you are still depending on people making a decision to get in their car and drive to your restaurant as opposed to any other restaurant with a parking lot. Your restaurant has to be worthy of people choosing to eat there. I choose to eat exclusively at downtown restaurants as do many others. I have trouble getting reservations at most restaurants so I don’t thing they are all having trouble. It seems that the potential upside of downtown location is that you do have huge potential upsides with people coming in to downtown for museums and performances and other activities. It would be an interesting question for the DRA whether downtown restaurants overall perform more poorly than suburban restaurants.
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There are thousands of downtown residential units either under construction or in the development pipeline. Residential density continues on the upward trend.
That said, I’ve lived downtown since 2007. Restaurants come and go, but I don’t think parking is the deciding factor. There are parking decks (and surface lots, unfortunately) all over downtown. There’s plenty of parking. But just like any decent size downtown, you may have to walk a bit to get from your car to your destination.
There’s a lot more to the success of a downtown restaurant then having it’s own parking lot.
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True. Accessibility is but one factor to a successful restaurant amidst increasing challenges across all factors of running that business. Poor concepts, poor business strategies, increasing cost of doing business, labor stresses and sometimes downright poor luck lead to businesses shuttering all over the place regardless of location. But, it’s fair to say that location and a good understanding of who your customer will be is necessary to a successful business and the events of the past couple of years have shifted the alliances of loads of consumers and created upheaval that some owners simply have not been able to pivot their businesses to adapt to those changes. Parking rarely seems to be the only factor.
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What’s the location of this?