How Theatres With Restaurants Can Grow Secondary Spend

Every theatre knows the ticket is only half the evening’s value. The other half — secondary spend, the food and drink sold around the show — is decided in the hours either side of curtain-up: the pre-theatre dinner, the interval drink, the dessert on the way out. If your venue has a restaurant, it is the biggest secondary spend lever in the building, because dinner carries a higher spend per head than the interval bar and is not squeezed into twenty minutes.

And the audience for it is unusually easy to reach. Your diners-in-waiting have already bought a ticket, already planned their evening around your curtain time, and already trust you enough to spend the night in your building. The only question is whether they eat with you or with the café down the road. Here are seven ways to make it you.

1. Put dinner in the booking journey

The moment someone books a ticket is the moment they are most open to planning the rest of the evening — they are already in a spending state of mind. So dinner belongs inside the booking journey, not on a page they have to go looking for: on show pages, on the confirmation screen, and in the pre-show email alongside the practical visit information.

If your box office runs on Spektrix, you can take this to its logical end: Make a Rezzy integrates with Spektrix so a table is offered while the tickets are still in the basket, with dining times already matched to the show. We wrote about how the integration works here.

2. Set your sittings by the curtain, not the clock

A conventional restaurant diary offers its best tables at half seven and eight — exactly when your audience is settling in for act one. Work backwards from curtain-up instead. For a 7:30pm performance, your prime sittings are 5:30 and 5:45, and the table needs to be finished, not started, by quarter past seven.

Then look at the times a conventional restaurant ignores. After the matinee, the rest of the high street is between services while your building is full of people with an evening ahead of them. Post-show on a Friday, almost nobody is competing for the 10pm table. Those are sittings only a theatre restaurant can own.

3. Run a proper pre-theatre menu

A fixed-price, two or three-course pre-theatre menu earns its keep twice. The diner decides quickly, because the choice is short and the price is known before they book. And the kitchen can turn the table reliably, because it is cooking a menu it planned for the clock. An à la carte crawl at 6pm is how curtains get missed — and how a nervous operator stops offering pre-show tables at all.

Keep it seasonal, keep it priced to be an easy yes next to the ticket price, and put the serving times on the menu itself.

4. Sell the timing, not just the food

The single biggest reason a theatregoer books dinner elsewhere — or skips it — is the fear of missing curtain-up. You are the one restaurant in town that can remove that fear completely, because you own the curtain. Say so, in writing, everywhere: “seated by 5:45, on your way by 7:15” on the menu, the website, and the confirmation email. Make sure front of house knows tonight’s running time as well as the box office does. A diner who trusts your timings this month books again next month without thinking.

5. Capture the interval and the way out

Interval pre-orders are standard practice at the bar for good reason: twenty minutes is too short a window to serve a full house from a standing start. Apply the same thinking to the restaurant’s evening. Dessert and a drink after the show, or a late supper sitting at the weekend, catches an audience that is already out, already warm, and walking past your tables on the way to the exit.

6. Build a dinner-and-show package

Once the pre-theatre menu is running reliably, you have the makings of a theatre dinner package: ticket and set menu, sold together at one price. It works because it sells the whole evening in a single decision — the customer stops comparing your restaurant with the one down the road, because dinner arrived attached to the seats.

Packages reward the occasions when people are already buying the evening, not just the show: birthdays, anniversaries, work outings, and above all December, when party bookings and the panto run make dinner-and-show the default way to book. Put the package on the show page itself and in the pre-show email — the fixed menu you built in step three is what makes it deliverable on the night.

7. Remove the booking friction

Every extra step between “shall we eat there?” and a confirmed table loses people. A booking widget on your own site — on the restaurant page and the show pages, not just buried under “visit us” — beats a phone number that is answered when the box office is quiet. For Spektrix venues, the integration removes the last step entirely: dinner is offered in the same basket as the seats, timed around the performance.

Your audience has already arrived

None of this needs an advertising budget. The audience has found you, bought from you, and planned their evening around you — growing secondary spend is simply making dinner the obvious next click. Make a Rezzy handles the restaurant booking side for theatres: the widget on your own pages and, for Spektrix venues, dinner offered in the same basket as the seats. Book a ten-minute walkthrough and we will show you what it looks like against your own show times — no subscription, £1 per cover booked.