With the weather heating up and the summer quickly approaching, our patio is now open for outdoor dining! This summer, for as long as outdoor dining is available, our outdoor patio can accommodate the whole family, and we mean the whole family. You can bring your dog to Cork’s Bar & Restaurant with our dog-friendly outdoor dining patio!
No more leaving Fido behind at home, let your dog hang out while you’re all out to eat, or bring them so you won’t be alone for a night where you treat yourself. We want to curate the best dining experience for our guests, but everyone is different. When we can allow guests to bring their best friends, other people can have their best dining experiences.
Why Allow Dogs?
It’s not as easy as turning on a switch and deciding, “All Dogs Welcome!” There are rules we must follow, and we had to change our operations to do that. To warrant all the work, we had to have good reason to think it would be for the benefit of our guests.
Dogs are similar to children in that they can’t be left alone forever. They need to be fed and taken care of, asides from being trained. Depending on work schedules, home situations, and more, it might not be easy to leave a dog at home, or it would be easier for some people to bring their dog with them.
Sometimes people are already out with their dogs and are getting hungry, but they can’t go into most places because dogs aren’t allowed. At that point, you hope you find somewhere that allows dogs or you have to go home and you eat there. In these situations, we’ve made it easier for them to come to Cork Bar and Restaurant, and why wouldn’t we want that?
How Do We Keep Our Patio Dog-Friendly?
Only nine states allow restaurants near limitless freedom to have dogs on their outdoor patios. As it turns out, Pennsylvania is not one of them. This means that our home state has rules regarding when, where, and how a restaurant can allow non-service animals on the premises. These rules are strict enough that they have effectively led to a ban on having animals on outdoor patios. The work that goes into following the rules isn’t worth the effort to a lot of restaurants. For some locations, it just isn’t possible.
For us, it is. The Pennsylvania Food Code states, “No domestic pets or other animals shall be permitted where food or drink is prepared, handled or stored unless specifically permitted or required under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (Public Law 101-336, 104 Stat. 327) or other Federal or State law.” This basically means that we have to have separate areas where animals are allowed and the servers for those areas and other areas, have to be separate and dedicated to it.
Our location has a physical area where guests and waiters can enter and leave without going through the indoor dining portion of the restaurant. We also have the ability to separate the waitstaff and the food production for our indoor and outdoor dining areas. These are just examples of how we abide by state and local laws to create our dog-friendly patio for our outdoor dining guests.
Everybody’s Best Friend
It’s understandable that some guests would be concerned about other guests bringing in their dogs, but that’s why indoor and outdoor guests have different waiting staff and rules. If you’re worried about dogs themselves rather than your food, we don’t think you have to be.
In our experience so far, the dogs in our dog-friendly dining area have been friendly, welcoming, and especially polite to our staff. Dogs don’t drink too much alcohol, they don’t stiff the bill, and they don’t say rude things to staff or other dogs. Sure, sometimes they make a mess, but so do people.
In terms of safety, while there are dogs who are trained to be aggressive and/or don’t do well around other people and dogs, their owners know not to bring them. Why would they want to? If something were to happen, they would get in trouble, including their dog, so our guests only bring their dogs if they’re good with people and other dogs.
Reserve a Spot With Our Dog-Friendly Outdoor Dining Today!
So if you’re looking for a place where you can eat out with your best friend, consider Cork Bar & Restaurant. Our menu has many options for you to wine and dine outside on a warm summer day. Make a reservation online today!