The Food Monkey: Everything You Wanted to Know About Restaurant Week Winter 2008 But Were Afraid To Ask

Have a new menu unrelated to anything the restaurant usually does, usually involving some skirt steak dish and grade Q ingredients out of the compost heap:
This is, alas, the common trend in restaurant week. If you go to Restaurant Week, especially for dinner, chances are that this is what you get. Throw some skirt steak on the plate, add some “specials” made from leftovers ingredients from the real service, and there’s your Restaurant Week menu. These places usually come with snobby service (see my report on the Federalist, fortunately now Mooo) because the attitude is to dumb everything down for the plebs. Admittedly the servers are working for a fraction of the tips they usually get, but restaurant owners should realize this and act accordingly to make sure people aren’t forever turned off from their business.

Don’t have it at all:
I don’t like this, but at least I understand it. If you can’t do something right, don’t do it at all. I was talking to someone from a major Boston restaurant, and they told me that try as they might, they just couldn’t make the numbers crunch for both their kitchen and their staff. So rather than put out sub-par food, they just dispensed with Restaurant Week altogether.

Places that normally cost less than 20 for lunch and 33 for dinner that do Restaurant Week to BOOST their profit by tricking you into paying more money for the same (or lesser) food:

There many places doing Restaurant Week this year in Boston where you’d be hard pressed to spend 20/30 per person unless you bought a bottle of wine. These sneaky establishments (I won’t mention names) realize that people assume that only the more expensive restaurants do Restaurant Week and that they by going for the prix fixe menu, they are getting a good deal. So in traipse the rubes and plunk down 3o bucks a head for a 20 dollar dinner. What’s more, out comes the cod fillets and skirt steak–surprise surprise–and you end up getting worse food than you normally would get, at double the price. Don’t be fooled! Check the regular menu prices and steer clear of any place that has a turkey club on their menu.

Overall, I feel that Restaurant Week is an opportunity for Chefs to share their art with a larger audience, so in an ideal world, all the Boston restaurants would be open serving their regular fare with impeccable service. But until this world indeed becomes ideal, and every man, woman, and child can laze under groves bacon trees clustered around pristine ice wine lagoons, well just have to enjoy Restaurant Week as best we can.

But chefs could also view this as a challenge worthy of every fledgling contestant of Top Chef: create a great meal indicative of the quality and ethos of your restaurant on a budget. Of the restaurants I’ve been to for Restaurant Week, No. 9 Park accomplished this task the best. So it can be done, and done well.

With that all said, it’s time to rack up the reservations, loosen the belt a few notches, and prepare to dig in. Happy eating!