re: Bleacher's Sports Bar & Grill to Replace Mahony's on West Chimes Street

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“traditional Louisiana food” like po-boys, fried fish, fried chicken, burgers

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That's an embarrassment to real traditional Louisiana foods.

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The rent was sky high and Mahoney's management was idiotic. They made an awesome burger though. I used to slip in there at lunch time regularly for that reason.

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And the Burger + Any Beer special they had was hard to pass up. I guess since it's the owner with this new place he won't have to deal with rent issues.

I never understood why so many different varieties of places all fail so rapidly there, where literally next door you have the Chimes, which is a stable staple.


So it obviously isn't general location, and there is a LOT of new and growing economic activity in the area (or at least is was when I went to LSU and places were still failing there) so its not like Chimes is sucking up ALL of the potential.

What gives?

I do think that they have the right mindset however at trying to focus on comfort foods to LSU students in a highly visible location close to ECA and multiple upscale off campus complexes.

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highly visible location close to ECA and multiple upscale off campus complexes.

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Visibility is one of the huge issues for these places. Chimes street being one way towards Highland is a pain for getting to any of those restaurants or bars on Chimes St.

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Tigerland is trash, plain and simply. I would go there in college even though it was obviously trash. Actually it's probably a good thing that they have a cluster of bars in a ghetto neighborhood strangely located in the middle of farmland for all the rifraff to go to

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ok?

Chimes street will have to do a lot more to lure kids away from tiger land.

hipster bars can be pretty fun when you get past the age of 20 and don't drink jack and coke anymore

No doubt it was dead most of the time.

But it did serve a purpose when the other bars in the area were packed with people.

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how can a bar not make it in that area? How bad was the Irish place?

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You have to have an advertising budget more than $0 to start or have one pretty intrusive word of mouth campaign. You're trying to break into an area where there are already established bars, so if you're going to rely on walk ins you're going to watch people walk right on by to Chimes, Varsity, and Barcadia. Very few people are going to walk into a mostly empty bar, so the concept of slowly building a client base from a slow rolling start just probably isn't going to work.

Now, that area is not walking distance to many LSU students any more, but it is walking distance to games. I think I'd have something like $1 tacos to go on game days, also have giant cokes/waters in cups that have my businesses name plastered on them (aka the Newks trick), and let people walk around campus on Saturday with your brand all over the place.

For gametime, have drink specials for all the people who were tailgating but didn't have tickets to the game, try to make an event of it.

If you're going to succeed I think you need to try to pull in LSU's best marketing asset - football tailgating.