The latest casualty of the Great Recession appears to be the calendar, or at least the one used for restaurant promotions. A week once meant seven days, no exceptions. Now that timeframe can extend to more than a month if we’re talking about Restaurant Weeks, the campaigns where a location’s fine-dining places simultaneously offer multi-course meals for the same bargain price.
In New York City, birthplace of the promotion, “week” was first redefined this winter as two partial weeks—six days in mid-January, followed by a regular Saturday night, then reinstituted for the next five days. It’s a model that’s been widely copied.
But with conditions being what they are, restaurants in New York decided to extend the cooperative promotion—for four more weeks.
The city’s restaurant trade was hardly alone in trying to squeeze a few more bookings out of the promotion. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Denver, San Diego and Los Angeles all extended their timeframes, to name just a few of the places that offer a Restaurant Week.
And I really, really mean those are just a small sampling. Another cultural side effect of the financial meltdown is the spread of the Restaurant Week concept to every nook and cranny where you’ll find a fork and a menu. Ohio’s Miami Valley has a Restaurant Week. So does Norfolk, VA, and Bethesday, MD. They, by the way, all extended their Restaurant Week by at least a…well, a week. As it used to be defined.
Floral Park hasn’t yet lengthened its Restaurant Week. This year marks the first time the promotion has been adopted by the little-known town in New York’s borough of Queens. Floral Park Restaurant Week is in addition to the Queens Restaurant Week that was held late last year.
This year also marks the first Restaurant Week for Orange County, Calif., the restaurant-rich expanse south of Los Angeles.
It’s not as if the proliferation of Restaurant Weeks is watering down their appeal. Denver’s roster of participating places reportedly swelled this year to a record 225 establishments, from 174 in 2008. The Chicago Tribune reported that 130 restaurants are participating in the Windy City’s Restaurant Week, compared with 35 places last year.
Skeptics say a Restaurant Week is nothing more than dressed-up discounting. I’m not sure why that bothers them. By all accounts, the tactic appears to work.
Value menus, varied portion sizes, bundled meals and out-and-out price chopping have become the standard marketing tools for casual-dining and fast-food chains in the current environment. Upper-scale restaurants seem to have found their Vise-Grip in the form of Restaurant Week.
Showing posts with label fine-dining. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fine-dining. Show all posts
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
A news sampler to start the week
The last few days brought a number of interesting yet little-noticed developments within the restaurant industry. Taken separately, they’re mere curiosities. But as connected dots, they form a picture of how the business is changing with brutal times.
Gordon Ramsay said to be in financial trouble: The New York Post reported Sunday that stardom hasn’t shielded the ill-tempered chef from the economic free-fall. Foxtrot Oscar, his celebrated London restaurant, is now closed two days a week, and two of his other eateries there are rumored to be for sale, though Ramsay insists he’s not looking for a buyer, according to the tabloid.
“21” loosens its dress code: The famed New York playground of the rich and wrinkled has reportedly dropped the requirement that men wear neckties at dinner. Spats, however, are still recommended. Okay, I made that last point up. But the tie rule was equally as outmoded. Most old-guard restaurants would let you dine buck naked these days to put a butt in a seat. What’s covering said butt shouldn’t matter in an economic situation as dire as the present. It’s enough to make you fall off your polo pony—which, by the way, can no longer be valet-parked.
No more lunches for Boston’s Locke-Ober: The Beantown landmark has been keeping its doors shut until dinner since Jan. 1, but even a hometown newspaper didn’t notice until last week. That may explain why the service was discontinued. But it must’ve been a monocle-dropper to all the old Brahmins and blue hairs who’d been lunching there since the riffraff and nouveau riche started showing up. Where can a guy in tie and spats eat comfortably in a big city these days?
Pigall’s nee Maisonette fires down its ovens: The lone restaurant in the heart of the Midwest to earn a four-star Mobile rating has thrown in the napkin. Jean-Robert at Pigall’s, the Cincinnati restaurant that replaced the city’s famous Maisonette, is reportedly closing Feb. 28 because of strife among its partners and weak finances, which seem to go hand-in-hand these days. As a local newspaper notes, the announcement came on the same day the place was awarded its fifth four-star designation from the Mobile dining guide. It was reportedly the only eatery in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky to earn that lofty assessment. The closing speaks volumes about the state of fine dining outside the coastal enclaves that serve an international trade.
Gladstone’s to open in LAX: A riff on the mega-volume Malibu landmark is scheduled to be unveiled on Thursday in Los Angeles’ Marquis de Sade-sanctioned airport. The outlet will be run by contract feeder HMSHost Corp., which is also operating a La Brea bakery inside LAX, whose lone redeeming quality is being only a shuttlebus away from an In-N-Out.
Brinker’s in-store gift-card sales tanked: Not all of last week’s news tidbits were cooked up by independents. The parent of Maggiano’s and On The Border told investors last week that its workhorse Chili’s brand suffered a 14% drop in sales of gift cards within the chain’s restaurants.
The impact was tempered, CEO Doug Brooks explained, by year-over-year increases in sales of the cards by retailers and other third parties. A major factor for the in-store decline, Brooks said, was the discontinuation of a “bounce-back” deal--exactly like the ones countless other chains adopted this year. Persons buying a card were given a $5 credit, a sort of commission, that they could redeem during a later visit.
Brinker determined that the incremental business wasn’t worth the give-away. So it dropped the deal for 2008—a year marked by the availability of similar come-ons from other chains.
Gordon Ramsay said to be in financial trouble: The New York Post reported Sunday that stardom hasn’t shielded the ill-tempered chef from the economic free-fall. Foxtrot Oscar, his celebrated London restaurant, is now closed two days a week, and two of his other eateries there are rumored to be for sale, though Ramsay insists he’s not looking for a buyer, according to the tabloid.
“21” loosens its dress code: The famed New York playground of the rich and wrinkled has reportedly dropped the requirement that men wear neckties at dinner. Spats, however, are still recommended. Okay, I made that last point up. But the tie rule was equally as outmoded. Most old-guard restaurants would let you dine buck naked these days to put a butt in a seat. What’s covering said butt shouldn’t matter in an economic situation as dire as the present. It’s enough to make you fall off your polo pony—which, by the way, can no longer be valet-parked.
No more lunches for Boston’s Locke-Ober: The Beantown landmark has been keeping its doors shut until dinner since Jan. 1, but even a hometown newspaper didn’t notice until last week. That may explain why the service was discontinued. But it must’ve been a monocle-dropper to all the old Brahmins and blue hairs who’d been lunching there since the riffraff and nouveau riche started showing up. Where can a guy in tie and spats eat comfortably in a big city these days?
Pigall’s nee Maisonette fires down its ovens: The lone restaurant in the heart of the Midwest to earn a four-star Mobile rating has thrown in the napkin. Jean-Robert at Pigall’s, the Cincinnati restaurant that replaced the city’s famous Maisonette, is reportedly closing Feb. 28 because of strife among its partners and weak finances, which seem to go hand-in-hand these days. As a local newspaper notes, the announcement came on the same day the place was awarded its fifth four-star designation from the Mobile dining guide. It was reportedly the only eatery in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky to earn that lofty assessment. The closing speaks volumes about the state of fine dining outside the coastal enclaves that serve an international trade.
Gladstone’s to open in LAX: A riff on the mega-volume Malibu landmark is scheduled to be unveiled on Thursday in Los Angeles’ Marquis de Sade-sanctioned airport. The outlet will be run by contract feeder HMSHost Corp., which is also operating a La Brea bakery inside LAX, whose lone redeeming quality is being only a shuttlebus away from an In-N-Out.
Brinker’s in-store gift-card sales tanked: Not all of last week’s news tidbits were cooked up by independents. The parent of Maggiano’s and On The Border told investors last week that its workhorse Chili’s brand suffered a 14% drop in sales of gift cards within the chain’s restaurants.
The impact was tempered, CEO Doug Brooks explained, by year-over-year increases in sales of the cards by retailers and other third parties. A major factor for the in-store decline, Brooks said, was the discontinuation of a “bounce-back” deal--exactly like the ones countless other chains adopted this year. Persons buying a card were given a $5 credit, a sort of commission, that they could redeem during a later visit.
Brinker determined that the incremental business wasn’t worth the give-away. So it dropped the deal for 2008—a year marked by the availability of similar come-ons from other chains.
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