Hamburgers, cocktails and beer
Purchased in 2012, Starbucks’ La Boulange Bakery brand will open a Los Angeles restaurant with a considerably larger menu on 12 June. At the moment, La Boulange Bakery sells sandwiches, salads and omelettes, but it will add cocktails, beer, wine and burgers to draw in customers the whole day long.
Dinner will be served until 10 in the evening, whereas La Boulange Bakery used to close at 7 in the evening. To clearly stipulate the change, the LA restaurant will drop the Bakery suffix and simply be called La Boulange. If the pilot is successful, Starbucks will consider further expansion.
Move into the evening
It is no surprise that Starbucks took this step as it had already added an evening menu to Starbucks stores to get customers into the shop in the evening. At the moment, it mostly relies on people passing by in the morning to drink their coffee or at lunch-time, while other chains get part of their revenue in the evening as well.
Starbucks has had to intervene several times ever since it purchased La Boulange. It had altered the menu several times, which did not always please the regular customer, and was even forced to re-introduce a pastry it had previous deleted from the menu after a series of complaints.
