It’s baaaaack: Seattle Restaurant Week brings $25 three-course dinners (and some $15 three-course lunches) at a monster list of Seattle’s best restaurants. It started October 17 and runs through this Thursday (“Seattle Restaurant Week-and-a-Half” didn’t sound as good).
Ethan Stowell used to be a conscientious objector, back when S.R.W. was known as Twenty-Five for $25, on the grounds that limiting the list to 25 places benefitted a select group of restaurants and essentially penalized others. (In 2006, Stowell sent out a list of things besides fine dining one ought not to buy on special—including a parachute, birth control, plumbing, a tattoo, a time machine, therapy, and brakes.)
But now that it’s been opened up to all comers—with more than 100 restaurants participating—all of Stowell’s restaurants are on sale: brand-new Staple & Fancy Mercantile in Ballard, Anchovies & Olives on Capitol Hill, How to Cook a Wolf on Queen Anne, and Tavolata in Belltown.
Cornichon makes the argument that S.R.W. and similar promotions are disastrous to the industry (calling them “assisted suicide”). He makes some good points, and it does seem clear now that if a restaurant doesn’t join, it’s looking at 10 days of tumbleweeds (as was the case last week at brand-new, really good Sushi Kappo Tamura, where the chef/owner said they’d just missed the cutoff for participating). Cornichon:
I have two more questions for restaurant owners: why in the world would you turn your back on your regulars, who support you and your elegant, high-priced dinners year-round, for the purpose of bringing in dozens of bargain-hunting cheapskates who would never pay your everyday prices?… Why, in other words, are you training your customers to pay half price?
One answer might be that regulars are just not as regular as they used to be back before the euphemistic economic downturn. And anyone being trained by S.R.W. has to watch and wait for the next promotion—which some people surely do. Just as surely, however, some lured in by promos do come back for their next special occasion, or when they win the lottery, or whatever.
Cornichon leaves open the possibility that Restaurant Week might actually be great for the eaters of the city (costs to the restaurant be damned)—you get to try out places that would normally cost a LOT more. Caveat emptor, though: Some of the places don’t cost a lot more than $25 for three courses, so you’re limiting yourself to a set menu in order to get a few bucks off, or a free dessert.
And some places bring it—they staff up appropriately to make sure service doesn’t suffer, they take a loss on ingredients to make sure the special menus are really good, they do their damnedest to get you to come back and spend some real money (or just out of sheer pride). Others do an indifferent job at best—which would seem to defeat the purpose, but…
Some good bets from this year’s list: Boat Street Cafe, Joule, Kisaku, Restaurant Zoe, and Spring Hill. Or test out newcomer Staple & Fancy, or new Seatown Snack Bar from Tom Douglas (a.k.a. T-Doug), or Boat Street’s baby sister the Walrus and the Carpenter. (The one-word-restaurant-name trend seems kind of nice in retrospect, doesn’t it?). Find out more about all the restaurants (or write your own reader-review) over here.
We enjoyed Steelhead Diner’s Seattle Restaurant Week menu offerings last night: if it weren’t for the opportunity to read the menu from the comfort of our home, I doubt we’d have bothered with the quest for downtown parking. I’d been wanting to go to Steelhead for months but there are so many intriguing places to try — Seattle Restaurant Week, along with Restaurant.com and yes, the gift certificates offered in the upper right column of the SLOG site, do bring out people who otherwise watch their pennies (and yes, we are “adequate/good” tippers).
Is it really a consumer’s obligation to worry about the bottom line for restaurant owners? If a restaurant decides to lose money on every table it fills, then that’s his choice. Eventually an unprofitable business will cease to exist, giving plenty of motivation not to lose money on each table. Really — what’s the point of this sort of dialog at all? We don’t have a centrally-planned economy. If some businesses benefits from a promotion like this, then those benefits will follow the profit motive and participate. While it’s true the longer-term effects on demand are unknown, demand elasticity over time isn’t possible to predict anyway. If it weren’t promotions hurting business over the long haul, it could be Boeing leaving or the recession or the home-cooking revolution or, or, or…
These promotions motivate my friends to check out nicer places with me when they otherwise wouldn’t. They encourage me to try new places for the heck of it. And while I’m of course self-conscious of being perceived as a cheap diner, I’m not afraid to walk into a nice place during the rest of the year for fear of being overcharged. And my experience last week at Tilth — the best risotto I’ve ever had — are going to bring me back for their regular menu.
One problem that really bothered me: Cornichon ignores that these business decisions are always marginal. Is the cost of cooking two salmon steaks twice the cost of cooking one? Almost certainly not.
I think it encourages folks to try a place they may have been on the fence about. If you get a few new people and it costs about the same as another marketing campaign, what’s the harm?
I went to Poppy last week and had a fabulous meal. Now it’s on my list to consider another time. So I think they won, too.
I’m happy to hear from readers who think this through to the end. Restaurant Week is, indeed, a marketing campaign like any other. It’s just one that every one of your competitors are running at exactly the same time and with exactly the same offer.
Is it the diner’s responsibility to keep restaurants in business? Well, yes. Restaurant owners are not, by and large, financially savvy. Why else would they keep sending out half-off coupons? Or joining their competitors to sell discounted dinners? That’s my point: you patronize a restaurant because you love the food, the experience of eating that food at that restaurant. If there aren’t enough of you, the restaurant goes out of business. But if there are too many of you during these promotional weeks, you’re forcing them to lose money …
My partner and I decided to go to Tango on Sunday night. Neither one of us having been before. We loved it! And will be back. The steak I had was superb. It only cost $25 for 3 courses. The steak itself was normally $19. I would definitely pay $19 to have this meal again. And wouldn’t have ordered dessert anyway. They now have 2 repeat customers. The food was great and we got to try, share and sample lots of their menu for $25 each. Our entire bill was more like $125 with drinks and additional apps. So I believe this only helps GOOD restaurants. Now go check out Tango if you’ve never been!
I’m happy to hear from readers who think this through to the end. Restaurant Week is, indeed, a marketing campaign like any other. It’s just one that every one of your competitors are running at exactly the same time and with exactly the same offer.
Is it the diner’s responsibility to keep restaurants in business? Well, yes. Restaurant owners are not, by and large, financially savvy. Why else would they keep sending out half-off coupons? Or joining their competitors to sell discounted dinners? That’s my point: you patronize a restaurant because you love the food, the experience of eating that food at that restaurant. If there aren’t enough of you, the restaurant goes out of business. But if there are too many of you during these promotional weeks, you’re forcing them to lose money …
@6 “Is it the diner’s responsibility to keep restaurants in business? Well, yes.”
I disagree. It is the restaurant’s job to create a great product/meal/experience that will keep people coming back time and time again and keep the restaurant in business. If the restaurant makes crappy food, or has terrible service, or has an owner that makes poor financial decisions, it is the responsibility of the restaurant, not the diners.
It’s wrong to assume that those using the coupons are cheap and that restaurant owners are doing a disservice to their “regulars” by participating in a ONE week promotion. I can understand frustrations when restaurants sell a million Groupons and make it hard for anyone else to get in to eat, but this isn’t the case. This seems more like an open house situation to me. Yes, they may lose money, but they are bringing in potential regulars. Every business operates this way at some point.
Cornichon is just a snob. By letting in the ‘non-regular’ populace for only 10 nights (weeknights nonetheless), I sincerely doubt restaurants are alienating their regular customers. Most restaurants have regular promotions they advertise on their using email lists specifically for their regulars.
I like eating out at nice places, but I couldn’t afford it when I was a graduate student. SRW enabled me to try them and now I go back to these places regularly. And I was able to introduce friends to these establishments that would have never gone there otherwise.
Restaurants with intricate menus, expensive ingredients and great service must obviously charge more, and rightfully so. But limiting great dining experiences to only those who can afford it all the time will only hurt a restaurant’s ability to bring in new, appreciative patrons.
I went to Dahlia Lounge for lunch today and got the S.R.W. menu. It was excellent (tomato soup, seared salmon with mashed potatoes, green beans, hazelnuts and cipollini onions, snickers cupcake).
I wouldn’t typically spend $15+ for lunch on a work day at all, so the deal’s definitely the only thing that brought me there. But liking it may well bring me back there for dinner sometime when I’m feeling flush. *shrug*
Here’s why I think events like Seattle Restaurant Week is good for Restaurants:
My partner and I are what are commonly called ‘foodies’. Personally I absolutely *hate* the term. As bad as it is for the budget and probably our waistlines, we eat out 5-6 days a week depending on how many leftovers we accumulate. I think its one of the best things of living here! We often try new places especially when we get tired of our favorite dishes that we alternate between at our local places but this encourages even further. I like being able to trust a chef to come up with a set menu that showcases what they think will draw people back in using fresh ingredients that they can acquire at a good price (ie in season) and prepare in interesting ways. Unfortunately most restaurants in this country don’t normally carry a set menu (get to it restaurant owners!) so, if anything, I’ll splurge as much as I can depending on my schedule. If I can manage to spend $15+$25 instead of whatever the 1 dinner appetizer + 2 dinner entrees is? On a normal day I’ll probably have something from the freezer instead of going out because it’s more convenient and when we eat dinner there’s no way we can eat 3 course of the much larger courses they prepare when they make a set menu of portions that are more reasonably sized.
Is it the diner’s responsibility to keep restaurants in business? Well, yes.
It was a rhetorical question. I would not go into their kitchen and tell them to use cheap ingredients, nor would I go into their back office and tell them to pay their staff less. Customers certainly have no responsibility to ensure the financial well-being of any business, because we really have no say in how a place is managed. Customers may have preferences about that well-being, and it is easy to express that preference by spending more or less money at a given business.
you patronize a restaurant because you love the food
Sure, if you know you love it. But finding out whether or not you love the food at a particular restaurant is not free and often it is costly. I’m sure some businesses look at these promotions and either attempt to lower that cost (or pretend to) so, hopefully, more people will decide they love the restaurant and return in the future. (Many people have made this argument.) Other restaurants probably make more profit by having more customers even during these promotions. It’s impossible for us to discern each restaurant owner’s motives. A customer has no ability nor obligation to attempt to guess.
as a server at one of the participating restaurants, i believe i speak for every server in Seattle by saying this “promotion” SUCKS!! granted, there are some really cool diners who are polite and tip well. but they are in the vast minority. the other 95% are rude cheapskates who should go back to eating at Chili’s. maybe the the 5% of quality patrons that will be returning customers are worth it for the restaurant owners; but for the staff, this is 10 days of hell.