I was lucky enough to visit the Godfather Cigar & Martini Lounge two separate times last week, and I have to say, it was time well-spent.
When compared to more traditional, male-centric cigar lounges, Godfather feels more like a martini lounge that encourages cigar smoking. Which, in my opinion, creates a great atmosphere! Especially in the wake of the Michigan smoking ban, many of us are finding ourselves enjoying cigars in cigar shops. The opportunity to be able to visit a martini bar like Godfather and enjoy a cigar is a nice luxury (it’s a shame, but it’s reality, for now at least).
The next most note-worthy aspect of the bar is staff. The owner Marty is always quick to greet you with a smile and a handshake when you walk in, and Christine the waitress/bartender is cheery and quick to get you a drink or light your cigar (we even put her to the test mopping up a colossal spill after one of my friends’ coats cleared a full bottle of beer off of our table; Thanks Christine!). Couldn’t ask for more.
The humidor is fully stocked with a wide selection of mainstream brands including lots of Rocky Patels, Fuentes, Cohibas, Romeos, etc. It’s well maintained, and everything that I’ve purchased from it so far has smoked great.
The space features a full bar, offing any top-shelf beverage that you can think of, and a wide selection of bottled beers (rumors are that taps are being installed soon).
If you’re into wine with your cigars, they also offer a nice rack of bottles to choose from. The bar is also next door to Papa Joe’s (a high-end grocery store in Michigan). I’m not sure of the policy about buying wine at the grocery store and bringing it over, but you’d have a great selection available if it’s allowed (Papa Joe’s has an entire second floor of the store dedicated to wine).
The bar has enough plasma televisions to make it great for watching the game. I visited last Sunday with a group of friends, and was pleased to see the bar at least two-thirds full with other cigar aficionado sports fans.
If you have a chance, definitely stop by! You can find it on the map at CigarPlaces.com for directions. Visit their Facebook page for more photos and information on upcoming events.
They’re currently finishing the upstairs portion of the bar, so watch out for an update to this post in the near future when it’s open.
Thanks to Christine Kramar for this great review of the new CMT Cigar Lounge in Las Vegas. It’s just five minutes from the strip, and with three seating areas, a full walk-in humidor, and pro and college football on the TVs during the season, it sounds like a nice place to enjoy a stogie.
Be sure to check out her full review.
For directions and location information, see their page on the map CigarPlaces.com, and check out some other cigar bars in Las Vegas while you’re there!
How long will it take before location-based advertising will be adopted by the cigar community?
Google made an easy-to-interpret move in October when they asked Marissa Mayer to move over from VP of Search Marketing and User Experience into a position where she will be heading up Location Services. The writing on the wall: Location-based services are very important to Google. As location-based advertising continues to become more sophisticated, it will be interesting to see if the cigar community will find ways to leverage them.
This week I took off for California to catch up with an old friend and do some snowboarding in Lake Tahoe. One benefit that I’ve always enjoyed about traveling is the ability to step aside from calls, text messages, and other distractions, and think. While I traveled I had some time to think about how to drive foot traffic to cigar bars and cigar shops (something that I’m passionate about and spend a lot of time actively thinking about).
During my time in San Francisco I spent a night having dinner with a friend and his wife. She recently jumped on board with a tech-startup that has a platform that delivers location-based ads into mobile applications (think: walking down the street listing to Pandora on your iPhone and having a coupon for the Qdoba you’re walking past pop up).
This is obviously an exciting concept with a lot of challenges that come along with it. How well do these applications currently track location (if it’s low, the ads might not have value)? How much does the application “know” about the user? Foresquare could know a fair amount about your behavior by looking at your check-ins, but Pandora doesn’t know a 15 year old girl from a 45 year old man (Bieber probably makes much more of an appearance on the former’s Pandora channels, but I’m not betting advertising dollars on that sort of segmentation).
There would also appear to be somewhat of an inverse relationship to the specificity of what is being advertised, and the need for highly-specific location information. In other words, if you’re showing me a coupon for Starbucks, I want it to be the Starbucks right in front of me. But I’m used to going out of my way to hunt down cigar bars. If I land in a city and you show me cigar bars within 15 miles, I might still be happy.
So how long will it be before these applications will know enough about its users to be effective for something like cigar bar advertising? This isn’t broad-brush, reach+frequency, “brand supporting” stuff we’re talking about. It’s highly targeted both to your location and your interests.
Have any cigar bar or cigar shop owners tried anything location-based? Are there any success stories? Would you be willing to try it?
The Star Tribune in Minneapolis published an article yesterday about consumer’s ability to sample cigars in a cigar shop; something that has been legal since the city passed a 2007 law that banned smoking in most public buildings.
The city council is now claiming that the law is being abused, citing instances of people smoking entire cigars in cigar shops (how much is a “sample”? Do you want me to hold out the cigar so you can measure it with a ruler? Have I gone past the acceptable length?).
Because of his dedication to fighting the good fight, the cigar community needs to recognize Thomas Harlan, owner of Uptown Tobacco Shop who assembled a petition of over 800 signatures of customers who supported his ability to allow people to sample cigars in his shop. He presented his position in front of the council, explaining the providing customers with the ability to sample cigars gives him a competitive advantage over online cigar retailers who may be able to sell at a lower price. Thomas makes a great point, and hopefully a great defense against an already restrictive ban.
Thomas presents a point that I hadn’t previously considered with regards to fighting against a smoking ban. Great job, sir.
Google formally announced the roll-out of Places Search today; a major change to the Google search engine results page (SERP) that will have an impact on the way people find cigar bars (and other places) on Google, and the methods that cigar bars should use to get the most exposure on Google. They’ll be rolling it out globally over the next few days, so if you’re not seeing it on Google yet, take it for a test drive with this special link.
So how will this impact cigar bars and cigar friendly restaurants that are trying to show up as high as possible when someone types “[city] cigar bar” into Google? First let’s contrast the old SERP with the new Places SERP, then explore the differences.
A search for “denver cigar bars” before Google Places
This SERP features the standard “7-Pack” that Google displays when it detects that a search has a local aspect to it. In the past, cigar bars SEOs/advertisers would be have been focusing their efforts on getting their cigar bar into this 7-pack in order to get the most visibility and ultimately the most foot-traffic in the door.
A search for “denver cigar bars” with Google Places
Conducting the same search after Google Places has been rolled out will yield a slightly different result. In the image above, the map has been moved to the right column (an obvious effect of Places), but the 7-pack still persists. What gives?
It appears as though right now, the query “denver cigar bars” doesn’t have a strong enough local signal to kick Google completely into places-mode. Have a look at the next image to see what I’m referring to.
A search for “denver chiropractors” with Google Places
In this image, we can see the full impact that Google Places has on the SERP. Under the AdWords ads at the top of the page, you can see a number of local listings that have been made to look more like standard organic listings, only with some enhanced information (reviews, address information, logos/pictures).
New Ways to Promote Cigar Bars
So if the 7-pack is dead for some queries, what changes? As we can see from the image above, it becomes even more important to be ranked high in the local results. If being in the top seven was key yesterday, being in the top three is key today (the other four items from the seven pack are now pushed down below the fold on the SERP in the image above). Here are two quick steps to give you a head-start. 1) Make sure that the Places Page for your business is as complete as possible (reviews, website link, phone number, etc). 2) CigarPlaces.com gives you a place to add your website URL when you add your listing to the site. This is free SEO link-juice! Take advantage of it by making sure your URL is there, and correct!
The Affect on CigarPlaces.com and other Directories
Fortunately for CigarPlaces, there still isn’t enough accurate meta-data (descriptive content) surrounding restaurants and bar listings, for Google to be able to provide a search engine results page that is filled with the best cigar bars in the area where you’re searching. This is obvious not only in the fact that our query above for “denver cigar bars” returned a page that didn’t take complete advantage of the new Places feature, but also because the results that were returned aren’t the best (the top result is the Creager Mercantile – a wholesale distributor for convenience shops).
There’s no doubt that Google is committed to improving local search, and the quality of their results. And when they target something, they usually find a way to do it better than anyone out there. But for now, vertically-oriented maps and directories such as Yelp, CigarPlaces, InsiderPages, and UrbanSpoon are still a great source of information and reviews, and a great vehicle for cigar bar advertising.
Every cigar that I’ve lit recently has been paired with the comment: “Man, it’s been a while since I’ve had a cigar.” Whoever I happen to be smoking with is usually quick to agree that their cigar enjoyment has been drastically reduced as well.
It’s no mystery that this is a direct result of the Michigan Smoking Ban that went into effect on May 1st, 2010. It has now been six months since the ban took place, so I thought it would be a good idea to reflect on how it has impacted me (and ask you to add your stories in the comments section).
Before the ban, I would have classified myself as a pretty light smoker when it comes to frequency. A cigar or two each week was enough to keep me happy, and sometimes I’d go a week or two without having one if my schedule got hectic (I know, it’s not a pretty thing to imagine).
Aside from the hectic weeks, my cigar smoking patterns were pretty predictable. There’s a local bar/restaurant about a block from my office with a fantastic outdoor patio area (Kona Grill). When it comes to happy hour in the Northern Detroit Suburbs, this is the place to be. At least once a week you’d find me there with three or four of my friends, each of us leaned back in our chair enjoying a cigar.
On Friday, April 30th, I joined my friends like any other Friday, except this time it was to enjoy one last cigar on the patio and to say goodbye to our weekly tradition. Minutes after we had lit our cigars, a group of women sat down at the table next to us and ordered drinks. After realizing that their nasty glances weren’t having any effect on our good time, they gathered their things and stood up to move to another table. As they walked away, one of them leaned over and said into my ear in her meanest voice, “enjoy it, because tomorrow you won’t be able to.” As a cigar smoker, the comment didn’t surprise me, but the amount of joy that she obviously took in someone’s rights being stripped away did. Tomorrow things would be different.
At the time, I didn’t realize how much the cigar ban would influence my patronage of Kona Grill. After all, the place has a great environment, an awesome happy hour menu, and we were regulars. I should clarify that – I’m not really a “bar guy” (think Norm from Cheers), but we were in this place enough that the managers would come to my table and chat when I was there, and I know most of the waitresses by name.
For a few weeks, we tried to keep up the ritual. We’d circle up, order some sushi and some drinks, the girlfriends would join us, but it wasn’t the same. At one point, one of my friends finally exclaimed, “this place just isn’t the same without a cigar.”
Six months after the ban, we’re lucky if we catch one happy hour per month (I’m obviously not the only one whose behavior change has hurt Michigan bars and restaurants).
Aside from happy hour, my other typically cigar-centric events have also been disrupted. Getting together for a cigar and a few drinks on a Saturday or Sunday to watch a football game isn’t quite the same without the cigar. We still head to a sports bar and watch the game, only now it’s without a cigar. It’s true that we could find a cigar bar in Detroit to watch the game at, but the reality is, we haven’t.
Interestingly enough, my love for a good cigar has been somewhat spared by frequent business trips to Chicago. Ironically, Chicago is also a smoke-free city, but their ban is slightly different. In Chicago, bars and restaurants can allow smoking in outdoor patio areas, and there are a lot of great Chicago Cigar Bars! I can trace the fact that I enjoy a cigar on so many of these trips to the somewhat less-restrictive Chicago smoking ban, the fact that I’m typically traveling with cigar-loving business people, and most likely the fact that I’m out of town, and free from the obligations/chores/requirements that come along with being at home.
Even with these trips, the times that I get to enjoy a cigar each month have been drastically cut short by the smoking ban, and it seems that I haven’t found a good way to compensate for it (going to new cigar bars, etc).
If you have a chance, leave a comment and let us know how life has changed since May 1st.
