Restaurant Weeks Offer Great Deals
Save money while eating out at restaurants across North America.
Eat at expensive restaurants at a fraction of the price by timing your travel during a city's Restaurant Week.
In major cities across North America, you will, from time to time, encounter a special event known as a Restaurant Week. It may also go by other names, such as "Dine Out (name of city)," but it all describes the same concept: a group of well-known, and often pricey, restaurants banding together for a week to offer a prix fixe menu for an average cost of $20 for lunch or $30 for dinner.
Often these meals will be off a special menu the restaurant has put together offering the guest a choice of two or three items in each of three courses: appetizer, entree and dessert. Considering that in some participating restaurants, an entree alone costs more than the entire prix fixe meal, you can really enjoy the best dining the city has to offer at a fraction of the price.
Let's look at Tribeca Grill, Robert DeNiro's famed restaurant, which regularly participates in New York City's Restaurant Week. Their Winter 2007 dinner menu for the event includes the diner's choice of appetizer (yellow split pea soup, heirloom beet & goat cheese salad or chicken apple sausage with butternut squash), entree (wild mushroom & fontina ravioli, braised pork shank or roasted grouper) and dessert (apple tart with sorbet, English toffee bread pudding or creme caramel) for $35. If you were to order a la carte, the appetizers average about $12, the entrees average about $25 and desserts average $9. So ordered separately, the cost of your meal could be $46 or more.
Several cities are participating in the Winter 2007 round of Restaurant Weeks, including New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Vancouver, B.C. and Washington, D.C. with January and early February dates.
There is usually a late summer/early fall set of Restaurant Weeks, as well. No specific cities or dates have been announced for those, but last year the cities that held the events included Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles and Miami.
During these events, not only can you save money while enjoying fabulous restaurants, but many use the Open Table reservations system, which donates to City Harvest and Share Our Strength with each reservation made. So you save money and give at the same time. Not a bad deal at all.
For a list of participating cities and dates, please visit OpenTable.com. You can also keep an eye on my blog and I'll post when these events are happening.
