McFadden’s Irish pub boasted a line down North Shore Drive on Thursday afternoon. The bar between PNC Park and Acrisure Stadium usually doesn’t get jam-packed until late at night, but business was booming most of Thursday and Friday.
The reason why is hard to miss. McFadden’s is within eyesight of the 2026 NFL Draft, or at least the outer edges of the fan experience section. The establishment has seen “a lot of overflow” from the event, said Brenden King, head of security at McFadden’s.
On Thursday, McFadden’s logged a long night with some of the bar’s food selling out.
“That Day One is similar to Steelers games,” said Shea Capers, who has bartended at McFadden’s for 17 years. “We’re used to very high volume days. We’re used to 600 people being in here. It’s what we do.”
About a half-mile away, Peppi’s sandwich shop on Western Avenue had simplified its menu, stocked up on ingredients and brought in extra staff ahead of what owner Jeff Trebac expected to be a hectic three days. Instead, business has been anemic.
“I took a gamble,” Trebac said. “We lost.”
The hordes of football fans who have descended on Downtown Pittsburgh and the North Shore for the draft, which runs Thursday to Saturday, don’t seem to be willing to travel far to fuel up.
The result has been a small handful of bars and restaurants near the draft footprint going gangbusters and getting their share of the $120 million to $213 million tourism agency Visit Pittsburgh estimates the draft will bring.
On Friday, Paul Latkowski, executive chef at Shorty’s Pins X Pints, also on North Shore Drive, said he’s been clocking 18-hour days at its North Shore location since Wednesday.
“My preparations were to basically do the busiest Steelers game we had last year times 10,” he said. “I would say we’re at about times seven right now.”
Gaucho Parrilla Argentina on Sixth Street Downtown had waits of about two hours at one point on Thursday.
“It’s been Saturday numbers here all week,” said Molly McGrath, assistant general manager and beverage director at Gaucho.
At Burgatory on the North Shore, business has been double its usual rate, assistant kitchen manager John Graham said on Friday. In addition to specials, the restaurant prepared for weeks to offer a full “outdoor experience” with a patio cocktail bar and smashburger cookout. Luckily, the weather has held out, with no rain and temperatures hanging in the 70s for much of Thursday and Friday.
Food trucks and stalls inside the event — some run by concessions contractor Aramark and others by local businesses — have also enjoyed lengthy lines. Vendors have described a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be at the heart of such a massive event. Only 100 of more than 1,000 businesses that applied to the NFL’s vendor program, not all of them eateries, made the cut.
But at establishments in the rest of the city and even into the suburbs, customers have been hard to come by.
The ghost-town feel brought to mind the massive January snowstorm for Emma Hopf, a food runner at DiAnoia’s Eatery in the Strip District
“And we still had more customers then than we did yesterday,” she said.
‘Where are they eating?’
Bill Fuller, president of Big Burrito Restaurant Group, has seen a steady stream of diners at Alta Via in Market Square. But it’s the only one of 18 restaurants in his portfolio that sits right next to the draft area. On balance, Thursday and Friday were not kind to Big Burrito.
Reservation books were sparse these days at Casbah and Soba in the East End. Same goes for Eleven in the Strip District, which lies a half-block outside of Downtown. Even the Mad Mex locations in Canonsburg and Cranberry have been unusually quiet.
“My chefs are texting me, where are they eating?” Fuller said.
He suspects the answer is within the immediate vicinity of the draft, or for those who didn’t go to the event, at home.
“There was so much hype about there was going to be a bunch of traffic and a bunch of crowds, everybody locally was scared into their houses,” he said.
These woes haven’t totally come out of left field. Some restaurateurs in Kansas City and Green Bay, both of which hosted the NFL Draft in recent years, reported similarly slow business during the event.
Jerad Bachar, president and CEO of Visit Pittsburgh, previously warned that businesses outside the event footprint shouldn’t “overprepare for a large influx” of customers.
Like so many other Pittsburgh restaurants, Hofbrauhaus in the South Side missed the memo and planned for a surge in business. Traffic has been down by about 40% during the draft, according to Emily Krepinevich, the brewery’s manager. But perhaps Saturday, when the draft gets into its later rounds before wrapping up entirely, will be a different story.
“I still have hope,” she said.