Owners of commercial real estate aren’t expecting a banner year for their retail property. Growth in retail lease rates has slowed, investors are putting more of their money into office buildings instead and there’s been only a slight decrease in vacancy rates, which now hover at 8.1 percent nationally. Thing is, you’d never know any of that by talking to a restaurant owner. “We’ve been looking for over three years,” says George Katakalidis, whose California-based Daphne’s Greek Café is expanding in the Phoenix area.

So, you figure that your beverage menu is plenty profitable. The bar is full of coworkers sipping after-work cocktails, folks in the dining room are ordering wine, and specialty coffee sales, well, they’re way up. Your beverage program’s doing just great, right? Not so fast. According to the experts we tracked down, there are plenty of money-saving—and moneymaking—ideas that you might have missed. “A lot of operators are naive,” says consultant George Delgado of PROmixology.com. “Because they’re making money at the bar, they’re not paying attention.”

Before she heads off to work, managing her father’s restaurant in Elkin, North Carolina, Shannon Sparks logs onto the Internet and checks bids from the night before. Unlike most online auctions, the bidders aren’t vying to buy a camera, an antique or a slightly used iPod. They’re bidding for the right to lend her family’s business, the Basin Creek Country Store, $20,000 for a new point of sale system. Sparks is trying out a new funding source for restaurant owners, entrepreneurs and everyone else: a website called Prosper Marketplace or Prosper.com.

It’s not going to do you much good if you go broke outfitting the back of the house. But if you use a little creativity here, a little elbow grease there, you can have a first-rate kitchen with money to spare. Take a look at what these inventive operators did with a little money and a lot of ingenuity. They spent anywhere from just over $13,000 to, in one extreme example, over $200,000 for a whole new prototype for an entire chain's new kitchen.