Valentine’s Day is the ‘Super Bowl’ of holidays for restaurants, flower shops

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) – As Valentine’s Day comes to a close, some local businesses say they survived one of the busiest days of the year.

“This is the Super Bowl. This is the big day,” said Carlos Cisneros, general manager of Bocca Ristorante.

When you think of Valentine’s Day, you may think of love, flowers, chocolate and fine dining. A holiday like this can bring big profits to local businesses.

“You could buy a luxury car, let’s put it that way,” Cisneros said.

Valentine’s Day is usually a busy night for upscale restaurants like Bocca Ristorante.

“We started booking up in December and we got a little nervous because we do a pre fixe menu and we didn’t have the pre fixe menu together yet because we were still focused on Christmas and we started getting all these reservations and we were like, woah, we need to get ready,” said Cisneros. “I think it was like January 2, we started prepping all of our reservations and getting things ready for [Valentine’s Day].”

With the holiday falling on a Friday this year, Cisneros says it becomes even busier.

“This is the Valentine’s Day on steroids. It’s kind of like Cinco de Mayo landing on Taco Tuesday, like it amplifies the amount of excitement and business,” he said. “People are off the weekend, they’re off the next day, so yeah, it’s like the perfect storm.”

Prep work for holidays is the name of the game from the hospitality industry to the floral industry.

“We counted roses and we ordered 4,500 roses for this week alone and that’s just one flower, of which we use many,” said Carolyn Chen, owner of Wild Things Flowers and Curiosities in Homewood.

“We got the flowers in on Monday and processing orders all week. We were here until 1 [Thursday] night so we live here at the shop on Valentine’s week,” Wild Things general manager Christine Long said. “We love it, we love Valentine’s Day. It’s the best.”

At Wild Things, it’s better to have too many flowers than not enough. Not only can the flower shop accommodate walk-ins on the holiday, but any leftover bouquets are hand-delivered to the Homewood Fire Department so firefighters on call can have fresh flowers to take home to their sweethearts.

Though Valentine’s is just one day, businesses can see celebrations drawn out for a week.

“A lot of the service industry people or the people who have to work Valentine’s Day tend to do this afterwards,” Cisneros said. “Our Valentine’s Day will probably be on Monday. Sunday to recover and then Monday to celebrate.”

Some businesses are expecting Valentine’s Day profits to continue early into next week.