The Recipe: Shoulder Season Isn't a Death Sentence
Every fall, something predictable happens in tourist towns across the country. The visitors pack up, the streets quiet down, and restaurant owners do one of two things: they either brace for impact or they get to work.
When I owned my wine bar in a small tourist town, the conventional wisdom was pretty unanimous. Scale everything back during shoulder season, hunker down, and wait for the tourists to return. Most of the other restaurants followed that advice without much question, and I understood the impulse, but I couldn't make myself do it.
We still had 7,000 people living in that town who needed somewhere to go and we had an incredible staff who deserved to be employed year-round.
So instead of reducing staff hours, closing early, or paring down our menu, we kept our hours the same. We started filling our calendar with events built specifically for locals, including wine tasting nights, fundraisers for community organizations, intimate Chef's dinners, and a Thursday night chair massage (where people paid by the minute and stayed for a glass of wine). We also cross-promoted with local breweries and wineries, which deepened our ties to the community and stretched our marketing without a big budget.
The result was that we stayed genuinely busy all year long. Tourist season barely moved the needle because the locals had already made us their spot, and they kept coming back long after the visitors had gone home.
I now spend part of my year in a tourist town in Montana, and I see the same pattern play out here. Some business owners shrug and accept a slow season as though it's simply the cost of doing business in a place like this, while others stay booked year-round because they've recognized something important: 8,000 locals can absolutely sustain a thriving restaurant on their own. You don't need a flood of tourists to succeed, you need a genuine reason for the people already in your community to keep choosing you.
It takes just as much energy to plan for success as it does to accept failure, so it really does matter who's in your corner and what they're steering you toward.
If you're heading into a slower season and you're not sure where to start, that's exactly the kind of challenge I love working through with restaurant owners through coaching. There's always a path forward, and you don't have to find it alone.