Every May, the same thing happens on Main Street. The University at Buffalo holds commencement, families pour in, and every table within a mile of campus is spoken for by people who booked it in March. We have watched this for years from the counter, and we have opinions about how to do it well.
Rule one: breakfast is where you have the flexibility
Dinner reservations on graduation weekend are the hard part. Breakfast is not. You do not need a reservation here, we open at seven, and a family of eight that arrives at 7:30 will be seated, fed, and out in time for a ten o'clock ceremony without anyone raising their voice.
Put the ceremony in the middle of the day and build outward. Breakfast here first, ceremony, photos, then dinner. If the ceremony is early, flip it: ceremony, then a late breakfast that is really lunch, which works because the whole menu runs all day and Grandma can have her eggs at one in the afternoon.
Rule two: the big dinner needs a room, not a table
The graduation dinner is usually the largest meal a family eats together all year. Fifteen people, twenty, thirty, with an age range from four to eighty-four. A regular dining room cannot really hold that gracefully, and the ones near campus are booked anyway.
What you want is a private room, and there is one directly across our parking lot. Our sister restaurant, The Steer, has an upstairs banquet room for parties of 20 to 100, with custom menus and a bar, and it is one of the better-known options for banquets in Buffalo NY precisely because of graduation season. They have written up how to book a UB graduation dinner in detail, including how far out to call. The short version: earlier than you think.
A sample weekend
| When | What | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Friday evening | Arrivals dinner, casual, no speeches | The Steer, main dining room |
| Saturday 7:30am | Big family breakfast | Here, no reservation |
| Saturday midday | Ceremony and photos | Campus |
| Saturday 6pm | The graduation dinner, 25 people | The Steer, private room (booked in advance) |
| Sunday morning | Hangover breakfast, milkshakes for the cousins | Here; The Steer is closed Sundays |
You will notice the family parks in the same lot for four of those five meals. That is not an accident. The two restaurants were set up to cover each other, and graduation weekend is when it pays off.
Dinner needs a room. Breakfast just needs you to show up.
Feeding the relatives who don't eat everything
Big family meals always include a vegan cousin, a gluten-wary aunt, and a child who eats plain pancakes and nothing else. We are good at all three. The vegan lineup here is real (a tofu-scramble benedict, seitan bacon, vegan French toast), the kids' menu exists and is priced like a kids' menu, and the cook will make an omelet out of whatever your aunt is allowed to eat. Across the lot, The Steer has a vegan menu of its own, so the cousin is covered at dinner too.
If you'd rather bring the diner to the party
Some families host at a rented house or an off-campus apartment and want breakfast delivered rather than eaten out. We do catering and event trays, from quiche and bagels to a full breakfast spread, and graduation weekend is our busiest week for it. Call early.
The morning after
Sunday is the day everyone is tired and the graduate is asleep until eleven. The Steer is closed Sundays. We are open at seven. Bring the family down to the diner whenever they surface, order a round of shakes for the cousins, and let the weekend end quietly in a booth. That is the part people remember.