Children's Museum Seeks Liquor License

A children's museum in Madison, Wisconsin, might not be the first place one thinks of when considering where to get one's drink on, but it could be a new option if organizers have their way and manage to get a liquor license to allow drinking on the premises.

According to Madison.com, the Madison Children's Museum has applied for a liquor license from the city. While the museum is primarily dedicated to serving children and families during the day, it hosts after-hours events for adults, and also rents out its spaces for events like weddings, fundraisers, and birthday parties. The problem is that the museum's in-house catering company, The Roman Candle, does not have a liquor license for the museum, and thus it cannot offer things like cash bars for its customers. It can serve alcohol, but only in an open bar format where all the alcohol is purchased in advance and given out for free throughout the event.

That's a problem for The Roman Candle and for the Madison Children's Museum, because many clients would like to offer cash bars for things like fundraisers, and not being able to offer an option like that means that the Madison Children's Museum has a harder time competing with some other local venues that do have liquor licenses, like the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the Central Library in Madison.

The museum says that if it gets its liquor license, it would not serve alcohol during museum hours. It would just serve alcohol at events from 5 p.m. to midnight, when there wouldn't be any children around anyway. The museum asserts that being able to obtain a liquor license for after-hours events would allow it to make more money from private events, which would directly help the museum with funding its primary goal of being a good museum for children and families during the day.