No matter the outcome of tonight’s big game, the New York Giants’ 2011 season has already gone down in history as a win for sports bars and restaurants across the city.
Bar managers reported a huge boost in business as Giants fans poured in every Sunday, buying beer after beer as games stretched into overtime.
“In Manhattan, nobody has a house for 20 people,” said Mike McCormack, manager of Foley’s New York Pub and Restaurant on 33rd Street. “Nobody has a living room big enough for eight or so of their friends, so Foley’s is their living room.”
At Foley’s, they sold out reservations for Super Bowl XLVI in 22 hours, he said.
In honor of tonight’s game, the bar banned Boston-brewed Samuel Adams beer. But that won’t stop them from raking it in: McCormack estimated that today’s revenue will likely be four times that of next Sunday, a football-free day.
Randy Shehady, a managing partner at The 13th Step in the East Village, which boasts 32 televisions, said Giants games bring a 40 percent boost in sales.
“It’s been a great season,” he said happily.
Every win meant a flurry of phone calls to reserve a spot for the following game. “The next morning, the phone would be ringing off the hook,” Shehady said.
Alli Cooke, event manager for the Village Pourhouse’s location on 46th Street, said the bar stocked Giants napkins and waitresses painted black stripes under their eyes in honor of the G-Men.
“We were just packed,” she said. “We’ve had such a great turnout, especially for the championship game.”
For the Super Bowl tonight, they’re serving $30 pitcher of Blue Moon bottles (blue for the Giants), which comes with a free order of “Victor Cruz chips and salsa.”
A Giants game this season made a big difference in revenue, she said. A slow Sunday normally brings in $2,000, but a Giants game packed with 200 fans can net as much as much as $8,000 by the end of the night, she said.
“It’s night and day,” she said. “When you have local teams that are doing well, it just makes all the difference in the world for sports bars like ours.”
