Sound Bites Restaurant will stay open late tonight after implementing a new policy aimed at attracting Tufts students hunting for Tuesday-night bar options.
The owner of the restaurant and bar decided to extend its hours until 1 a.m. on Tuesday nights after a Tufts student suggested to him that they work together to promote Sound Bites as a destination for middle-of-the-week revelers.
The junior, Hans Tiefenthaler, 21, wanted to revive what he sees as a struggling local bar scene for Tufts students. "The nightlife for that whole area just kind of went down since second semester last year," he said, referring to the Ball Square neighborhood where Sound Bites is located.
Powderhouse Pub and the now-extinct El Guapo Cantina, both located in Ball Square, once served as major destinations for pub-goers every Tuesday evening, which students commonly refer to as "bar night."
But some say Powderhouse Pub has stepped up its enforcement of underage drinking policy, and it now demands two forms of identification from those who use out-of-state IDs. Along with the elimination of El Guapo, this move has caused many Tufts students to turn away from Ball Square on Tuesday nights, seeking bars in other local neighborhoods instead.
[For further coverage of recent trends in students' bar-frequenting habits, see today's features section.]
Sound Bites will "be working within the law, but probably Powderhouse's overzealous policy [of identification checks] is not going to be in place," Tiefenthaler said.
"On a personal note, I wanted to get the Powderhouse and Guapo Tuesdays back. I figured it'd be a good idea to get Sound Bites to do it," he said.
For his efforts, Tiefenthaler will receive a commission from Sound Bites on all their sales on Tuesday nights.
Tiefenthaler said he had been promoting the restaurant and bar on campus recently. "I made some flyers I handed some out at Fall Ball," he said. "I've got some going up in the dining halls [and] some other places on campus." He has also created a Facebook.com group.
In addition to staying open until 1 a.m. on Tuesday nights, Sound Bites plans on introducing late-night programming soon to attract students on the weekends. "We're going to bring karaoke Thursday, Friday and Saturday. But that's more for February," said Walter Villatoro, the restaurant's manager.
After El Guapo closed last year, Sound Bites relocated into its space. This gave the restaurant, which had once concentrated on serving breakfast and lunch, extra room in which to open a larger dining area and bar.
In September, Sound Bites tried to capitalize on this change, and stayed open late for a handful of nights. But business did not catch on, Villatoro said. "We took over in July and we did a couple nights in September, but that was it," he said.
Villatoro said that repeated requests from students made him and the restaurant's owner, Yasser Mirza, reconsider the possibility of staying open late.
"Now the students ask me, 'Why don't you have the Tuesday nights?'" Villatoro said. "The more they ask, the more we think about it, and we said, 'Why not give it a shot?'"
So when Tiefenthaler told Mirza earlier this month that he would be interested in helping to make Sound Bites a Tuesday-night destination for Tufts students, Mirza agreed.
Although most Tufts undergraduates are under 21, Villatoro said that he does not plan to serve alcohol to underage drinkers. "We're going to have a bouncer," he said. "I think that's the right move - you don't want to get underage people."
The Tufts University Police Department could not be reached for comment on issues of underage drinking enforcement.
