NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — Felipe’s owner Howard Pike says it was a long and busy Mardi Gras this year, but a successful one.
Of his multiple stores, one stood out from the rest.
The French Quarter location saw about a 5% increase in sales compared to last Mardi Gras.
“That has a lot to do with just the area where we see the most tourists and also the area that’s most impacted by sort of the more general broader narrative about what people think of the safety of New Orleans,” Felipe’s owner Howard Pike said.
Restaurants that weren’t right on parade routes saw an increase in foot traffic as well, such as Copper Vine on Poydras.
According to the restaurant’s general manager Christopher Brower, one crowd in particular greatly helped boost the numbers.
“I would say that our biggest thing that we really did see was a lot of pre-parade float gatherings of krewes coming in here to wine and dine before they got into their own parades or the krewes that they were in or stuff like that,” Brower said.
Both restaurants saw increases in sales in both food and alcohol.
Brower says he was pleasantly surprised to see the increased table traffic this year at his spot.
“Sometimes, even though there are people that are coming in for to-go drinks, and that’s kind of all they want, some of them, but we actually saw more people this year coming to want to sit time and take time and enjoy our food, so we definitely saw an increase in food,” Brower said.
With the start of the COVID-19 outbreak more than three years behind us now, both men say that the Mardi Gras business scene is pretty much out of the woods and back to full force for the future.
“This year, people seemed a little bit more laissez faire as we like to say here, and that was a great thing for us. People just seemed more jovial and happy to be out and happy to be doing Mardi Gras without sort of any overhang,” Pike said.
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