Maid or Butler Café

Maid café/tea party type events have been a popular attraction at many anime conventions, including SNAFU Con. However, hosting such events at SNAFU Con can be challenging.

The biggest considerations are:

• The venue has very strict rules against outside food
• If you want to charge money you'll need a business license and there may be other legal considerations. Generally the con charges people vendor fees if they are charging for a product or service, but we pay for the business license fee when we are charging vendor fees.

There may be other considerations such as food handling licenses?

Groups that have been able to host Maid/Butler Cafes at the event have worked around the challenges by:

• Avoiding outside food restrictions by buying food for customers at the cash bar, or having customers bring food they bought at the cash bar or at a location inside the venue
  • Sometimes we can get prepackaged Halloween candy approved though the venue for us to hand out. While I don't think we could get like snack cakes approved, Halloween candy has been approved multiple times and is likely to be approved again, but there's never any guarantee.
• Avoiding business license fees and vendor fees by not charging and instead offering a tip jar on the table. To my knowledge they were not allowed to ask for tips, but only provide the labeled jar

Some groups have come in with food handling licenses, so I'm unsure if it's needed with food from the cash bar or packaged food.

If groups are looking to host similar events at SNAFU Con, they may need to explore other options that don't break venue rules, and we'll have to work closely together to make it work.