The Bro-Yo Campustown restaurant on West Wells Street officially added late-night weekend hours and will be open from 11 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
The new hours add to the restaurant’s usual 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. hours Monday through Sunday. Bro-Yo will start by offering its full menu during the extended hours. The menu or hours of operation may change depending on student reception.
“At first I wasn’t sure that we wanted to go through that, and for years people have asked, ‘can you open, can you open?,'” Bro-Yo Co-Owner Jim Gatto said. “We took a survey of students, and the number one thing that they asked for was late hours.”
The restaurant’s management weighed the difficulty of scheduling employees for the new shifts when making the decision.
“A few weeks ago, I said if we could put a staff together, then we could try it out,” Gatto said.
Many restaurants on West Wells Street opt to stay open later during the end of the week. Jimmy John’s is open until 3 a.m., Qdoba Mexican Grill is open until 2:30 a.m. and Papa John’s is open until 1 a.m. While the late-night hours can bring more business, it may also bring in fights, messes or raucous customers.
“If we can do it and there is no trouble, we’ll keep it going,” Gatto said. “Otherwise we’ll stop (the hours).”
The restaurant did a trial run to see how the extended hours would work and what the reception would be like.
“We thought it was a successful opening,” Gatto said about the trial run.
