How to Start a Cigar Program in Your Restaurant

Most restaurant cigar programs die for one of two reasons: the operator buys too much of the wrong thing, or the operator never figures out where guests are legally allowed to light up. Neither is complicated to solve. Across 9,127 repeat purchases of the same cigar by the same venue in our invoice records, the median gap between reorders is 90 days, which tells you the shape of a working program better than any sales pitch. A box of 20 sitting for a quarter is normal. A box of 20 sitting for a year means the wrong cigar, the wrong price, or no place to smoke it.

Here is the order I would build a program in, having watched a lot of hospitality accounts do it well and a few do it badly.

Can a restaurant legally sell cigars?

Yes, in most states, but a restaurant selling cigars is a tobacco retailer and needs whatever state and local tobacco retail license applies, plus compliance with the federal minimum age of 21 for every sale. Federal excise tax is paid upstream by manufacturers and importers, so a restaurant does not file with TTB. Licensing timelines run a few weeks to a few months depending on the jurisdiction.

The federal age floor is set by FDA and applies everywhere, with no grandfathering by birth year. Review the FDA Tobacco 21 requirements and build ID checking into the POS the same way you built it for alcohol. Servers selling cigars need the same training the bar staff gets.

Excise and permitting on the manufacturing side sits with the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, and the TTB tobacco page spells out who needs a federal permit. A restaurant reselling finished, packaged cigars is not in that category. Local licensing is the piece that actually gates you, and local licensing varies by county.

Where can guests actually smoke a cigar?

Indoor smoking is prohibited in restaurants in the majority of states, so nearly every restaurant cigar program in the country runs on a patio, rooftop, or detached structure. A covered patio generally needs open sides to qualify as outdoor under most local ordinances, often a minimum percentage of open wall area. Confirm the exact wording with your local health department before buying furniture.

The CDC tracks state-level smokefree air laws in its STATE System, which is the fastest way to see where your state sits. Then read your city code, because city code is usually stricter than state code. A few states carve out exemptions for cigar bars that meet revenue thresholds from tobacco sales, and those thresholds are specific and audited.

Practical version: if you have six patio seats with heaters and a wind break, you have a cigar program. If you have a sidewalk and a bus stop, you do not.

How many cigars should a restaurant stock to start?

Start with six to eight SKUs and roughly 60 to 120 total cigars. That covers a mild, a medium, and a full option at three price points without freezing inventory in a humidor that has not proven itself. The most common box size in our catalog is 20 cigars, accounting for 37.7% of all cigar SKUs, and packs of 10 or fewer make up 16.9% of SKUs.

Small packs are how you test. Below is what the common formats look like against a modest sell rate of two cigars per week per SKU.

Format	Example	Price per unit	Weeks to sell through at 2/week
5-pack sampler	AJ Fernandez Samplers A 5 Pack HumiBag	$27.00	2.5
10-count	Casa Turrent 1880 Colorado Robusto	$119.00	5
10-count	AJ Fernandez New World Dorado Toro	$97.00	5
24-count box	Perdomo Habano BBA Maduro Epicure	$207.00	12
24-count box	EP Carrillo Inch Nicaragua No 60	$229.00	12
50-count box	Rocky Patel Edge Connecticut (Lite) Torpedo	$349.00	25
100-count box	House Handmade Maduro Torpedo	$569.00	50

A 5-pack sampler is the cheapest way to learn what your room actually orders. Buy boxes only after a SKU has sold out twice.

What sizes and strengths should be on the opening list?

Carry a toro or robusto in the 5 to 6 inch range with a ring gauge in the low 50s as your core. Across 3,891 cigars in our catalog with recorded measurements, the average is 5.78 inches long and a 51.6 ring gauge, which is the size the modern market settled on. A 45 to 60 minute smoke fits an after-dinner window. A churchill does not.

Strength coverage matters more than brand depth. One Connecticut-shade mild for the guest who has never smoked a cigar, two medium Nicaraguans, one maduro, and one full-bodied option covers almost every table. Our active catalog runs 5,090 cigars with unit prices from $2.00 to $1879.00, and a restaurant list has no business at either extreme. Pick a spread that lets a guest choose between a modest cigar and a special-occasion cigar without a 10x jump between them.

How do I store cigars without building a walk-in humidor?

A 150 to 300 count cabinet humidor holds an opening restaurant list with room to grow, holds 65 to 70 percent relative humidity with an electronic or bead-based system, and fits behind a host stand or back bar. A walk-in becomes worth discussing only when a program is consistently turning full boxes every 30 days.

Stability beats size. A cabinet that sits at 68 percent all year outperforms a big unit that swings from 58 to 75 with the HVAC. Keep the humidor out of direct sun and away from the kitchen line, check the hygrometer weekly, and rotate stock front to back. Our humidor setup guide covers seasoning a new unit, which takes about two weeks before you load inventory.

Where do cigars belong on the menu?

Put cigars on the dessert and after-dinner menu, in the same block as port, cognac, and single malt, not on a separate card the server has to fetch. Programs that list three to five cigars by name with price, alongside the digestif list, attach far better than programs that hide the offering. Print the cigar’s length and ring gauge next to the name.

Train one line: “We have cigars on the patio if you want to stay a while.” That sentence is the entire program. The server who says it turns a 90 minute table into a 140 minute table with two more pours of whiskey attached. Pair by weight, not by cleverness: Connecticut shade with a lighter rum or an aged tequila, maduro with a tawny port or a bourbon.

Set your patio expectations too. Cutters, torch lighters, and a deep ashtray at each table are part of the cost of doing this properly, and cheap cutters ruin cigars and generate complaints.

How often will a restaurant reorder cigars?

Plan on reordering a given cigar every 90 days, which is the median gap across 9,127 repeat purchases in our invoice corpus. The average gap runs longer at 159 days, pulled up by seasonal and special-occasion SKUs that move only in warm months or around holidays. Build one standing order per quarter and adjust two SKUs at a time.

That cadence has implications. A cigar you reorder every 30 days is a candidate for a larger format. A cigar that has not reordered in six months should be run out on a bundle promotion and replaced. Track it on a single sheet: SKU, date received, date emptied. Two quarters of that data is worth more than anyone’s recommendation, including mine.

For the broader buying mechanics, our wholesale cigar buyer’s guide walks through formats, minimums, and freight timing, and the current shop catalog shows what is in stock today.

Sources and method: figures come from MDC’s invoice corpus of 24,343 product-linked line items recorded between April 19, 2016 and September 18, 2026, and from a live catalog of 5,090 active cigar SKUs, both current as of September 21, 2026. Regulatory statements reference FDA, TTB, and CDC primary sources linked above. Local ordinance language varies and should be confirmed with your jurisdiction.

If you want help picking an opening list of six to eight SKUs that fits your room, get started here.

Written by Peter Roth. Last reviewed September 21, 2026.