How Do You Solve a Problem Like Popularity?

Happyfield’s opening weekend drew such a crowd that the police visited twice, the council visited once, and there was a waitlist from the get-go.

“We had no marketing, no press release, and only 1000 Instagram followers on the Friday [before],” says Chris Theodosi of the Hot-Listed cafe’s 2020 launch. And yet, “The busyness, it was instant.”

Happyfield’s playful homage to the food and vibe of North America’s diners immediately stood out in Haberfield – a traditionally Italian suburb in Sydney’s inner west better known for its delis and Victorian architecture.

Thanks to social media, Tiktok especially, business has skyrocketed since then. “Demand has increased so much that we’re three times busier on the weekends than when we first opened,” he tells Broadsheet.

Now one of the suburb’s defining features, Happyfield is among a growing cohort of hospo businesses for which crowd control is almost as crucial a part of the operation as quality control.

As the sunshine-yellow cafe began attracting more attention for its Sydney-famous pancakes and “world-famous” Happiest Meal (a short stack, a sausage-and-egg muffin and hash browns), figuring out how to handle the hordes of diners became a top priority.

Over the years, Theodosi says, the team has put several measures in place to achieve “organised chaos”. Tweaks to trading days and times helped at first. Going from six days to seven spread the load to Mondays; changing Sunday’s opening time from 8am to 7.30am stopped it getting too busy too quickly. “We were filling up straightaway.”

But slowly increasing capacity has been the most effective tack – first by adding extra tables outside, then by snapping up the tenancy next door and doubling capacity with a second dining space, The Happy Room, in 2023.

And Happyfield is still expanding: this year the team will open Happy Shop, a spin-off cafe a few doors up Dalhousie Street with a different menu to the mothership. “The idea is to lessen wait times,” says Theodosi. “If people show up [to Happyfield] and it’s an hour wait, it’s something else for them.”

A dedicated host takes diners’ names and numbers, and “always asks them to go for a walk, rather than queue on the footpath”. For a cafe where it’s possible for the waitlist to hit 150 people, it’s a simple but successful approach.

To help curb the commotion out the front of Melbourne’s Calle Bakery in Carlton North, the owners have developed a clever line-management system: the queue runs right along the bakery’s frontage, skips the neighbouring business, then continues from the street corner, down the backstreet.

“We don’t want to cover the shopfront next door, but we don’t want to turn people away,” says co-owner Ellena Ly, who often has someone directing (foot) traffic. “We make sure [customers] are comfortable by sometimes offering samples – maybe cinnamon twists – and water in hot weather, and umbrellas if it’s raining.”

Having a staff member stationed near the door is also part of the play at nearby wine bar Bahama Gold, in Brunswick East. The wildly popular spot often lures more punters than its slimline digs can service – an occupational hazard tied to its very drinkable $10 glasses of wine.

“I almost don’t want to say,” says co-owner Simon Denman, when asked to describe the venue’s busiest night on record. “The footpath was well and truly taken over, I can tell you that.”

In lieu of security guards which, Denman says, “change the dynamic and the culture and the aesthetic”, it’s all about communication: as straightforward as staff letting each other know about empty nooks to usher waiting customers into.

But for better or worse, Bahama Gold’s compact size means the footpath out front invariably becomes the place to be. “[The venue] self-regulates a bit,” says Denman. “If it’s really pumping, you can’t get to the bar to order a drink, so you might go elsewhere.”

While Bahama Gold, Calle and Happyfield’s crowd control tactics are based mainly on fixed spatial limitations, Arbory Afloat – Melbourne’s summer-only floating bar – has a fluid fit-out. The team will literally unscrew tables from the floor to fit more punters if they have to.

“We’re lucky that Afloat’s pop-up nature comes with an adaptive and flexible build,” says venue manager Adrian Scott. In practice, that means that “some days or nights, in the peak of summer, we literally reconfigure the spaces before service to make sure we can accommodate crowds.”

So, the next time you hit Afloat and you’re surrounded by so many people you wonder how the booze-fuelled barge stays above the waterline – just know the set-up might’ve looked a helluva lot different before you stepped on board.