Restaurants, shops fill up Saturday with All-Star crowds after light start to weekend

At Slippery Noodle Inn, big crowds from the NBA All-Star festivities were filling up every table Saturday afternoon, keeping the servers and kitchen staff on their toes.

“We’ve got a full house right now,” co-owner  Sean Lothridge said. “I think we’ll have some good (sales) numbers tonight.”

It was a much-appreciated turnaround from the previous night, when a snowstorm hit the city and kept the turnout lower than expected. Like many other downtown restaurants, Slippery Noodle has been planning for huge crowds during the four-day event, beefing up staffing and making sure it had plenty of food and supplies on hand.

Yet the crowds were thin on Thursday and Friday, before growing on Saturday as fans began turning out in large numbers for the activities and entertainment.

“We’ve been fully staffed for three straight days, but this is the first day we really got hit hard,” said Lothridge, whose restaurant sits at 372 S. Meridian St., just two blocks from Lucas Oil Stadium, where numerous fan activities are taking place.

The All-Star Game will take place at 8 p.m. Sunday at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.

At The District Tap, 141 S. Meridian St., crowds were filling up the restaurant and bar Saturday, a big relief for management after two slow days. Friday “was kind of a flop” until late evening, General Manager Brent Drescher said.

“But today is great,” he said on Saturday afternoon. “This is exactly what we expected.”

Around the southern edge of downtown, crowds were building during the day, filling sidewalks and spilling into buildings to examine pop-up art galleries, parties and sports-apparel shops.

At Circle Centre Mall, large crowds were taking in the sights, including numerous pop-ups set up by NBA sponsors, including a retro game room on the second floor, with air hockey and vintage video machines erected for the occasion by sports apparel retailer Under Armour.

Some downtown restauranteurs took extra steps to meet what was turning into large crowds. Huse Culinary, which owns St. Elmo Steak House and Harry & Izzy’s, both on South Illinois St., pulled in employees from its three suburban restaurants to handle whatever crowds materialized over the four days.

St. Elmo, which is normally open only for dinner, expanded its hours to lunchtime on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, said Jason Benish, vice president at Huse Culinary.

“The number of staff we carry on hand is really only designed to do the dinner portion,” he said. “So coming up with enough people to operate it for lunch three days in a row took some creativity, some long-term planning and a lot of borrowing our own employees from other locations.”

Huse’s downtown restaurants also set aside a large portion of its dining rooms to handle walk-in traffic, rather than take reservations for the whole house.

A few blocks away, a nightclub and restaurant at 250 S. Meridian stocked up with five times the usual amount of spirits and two to three times the usual amount of food, co-owner Slater Hogan said.

The below-ground nightclub, called Patron Saint, and the ground-floor restaurant, called Saint Shack, saw decent crowds over the past three days, Hogan said. The business doubled its usual sales on Thursday and tripled its normal sales on Friday, he said.

“It was pretty steady from when the Celebrity Game [at Lucas Oil Stadium] let out, and it just stayed really busy all the way through, until three in the morning,” Hogan said. “The nightclub was pretty dead until about one in the morning, and then we got slammed and ended up doing pretty big numbers.”

But not all restaurants were seeing big volumes or big sales. Small Batch Soups by Soupremacy, located just off Monument Circle on East Market Street, was reporting light business Thursday and Friday.

Owner Danielle Cooney attributed it to two things. First, the business is a gourmet soup and sandwich shop, and many sports fans would rather have a slice of pizza or a full sit-down meal, she said.

Second, the restaurant’s normal clientele, downtown office workers, were largely staying away from downtown to avoid large crowds of fans and sightseers, along with re-routed traffic and some closed streets.

“It’s kind of a nightmare downtown if you’re really out in the middle of it,” Cooney said. “However, that being said, I think it’s going to be really good for the city. And I’m excited to see what other stuff happens because of this weekend.”