What’s Up With Dallas Restaurant Week?

I am sure every major metroplex in the country has a month or a period of time during the year to promote its food and beverage industry.  Here in Dallas we have the Restaurant Week and is an outstanding opportunity for Business Golfers to go to restaurants normally out of reach for the average person’s budget.

Most would think what this week long special deal was about offering a larger base of people who eat out frequently an opportunity to come into restaurants otherwise totally off their radar screen, especially in this economy.  Smart move on the city’s and restaurant industry part.

However, the question this year has become…

Is Restaurant Week a Marketing , Promotional Fair or an Opportunity to Churn and Burn a bunch of people into spending money in these Restaurants?

The answer is more than likely…Yes.

Over the past three weeks my wife and I, along with several dozen business golfers, have participated in dining at four upscale eateries here in Dallas.  The lure is the price.  For signing up for the month long program each restaurant offers a special menu for one week of the month.  Each menu has at least three courses for $35 a person.

Since we had never been to some of these eateries we had no idea what to expect with the exception that we were told by many..

WOW! That joint is very expensive.

So with that in mind we expected to experience the service and taste the food normally served on their regular menu.  Again. logically you would think that would be what the restaurants would want to be doing..show people what we have at a discounted price in hopes to get them to come in and eat at the Full Fare.  But…logic did prevail this year.

Bait and Switch

Knowing a few things about restaurant operations and a lot about business operations, I did not expect what we would be offered on the special menus would be the full-scale menu of items they would normally offer.  However, I did expect the same proportion of what they would serve on the regular menu and be given time to enjoy the restaurant’s ambience making it so special.

We found, in comparing the regular menus of the three establishments offering us the regular menu to review with the Restaurant Week Menu, what was on the RWM was not the same as what was on the regular menu.  So the question became…

Why offer us something not normally served in the same proportion as the regular menu?

Churn-N-Burn

I have no problem with a business making a buck or two.  Although, when a dining establishment with a lofty reputation signs up for a promotional program set up for the entire city’s restaurant industry you would think it would subsidize the cost of the meal from their marketing budget and not cut the quality or proportion to fit the $35 price tag.

This year it seemed that the Churn-N-Burn was the mode of operations three of the four restaurants we participated in so far felt they needed to use on participants of the Dallas Restaurant Week promotion.

For those of you who have never experienced a Churn-N-Burn, or had experienced it but did not know you were being treated that way:

The Churn-N-Burn mode of operations restaurants put into place during peak periods of the day.  This is where the waiters and service people are instructed to over serve so the meal moves quickly.  This is to get the diners in and out of the restaurants as quickly as possible.  These restaurants who do this are usually attempting to maximize their profit margin for that day or evening by seating as many people in one evening as they can.

What’s In It For Me

In one of the very upscale and well known Steakhouses we dined in it was very obvious Restaurant Week participants were barely tolerated. It was a Friday evening and there were a number of tables that remained empty the entire time we were there.

The long dissertation the waiter gave of other specials not on any of the menus, all twice as much per person as the RWM, told us a lot about how this establishment felt about the measly two courses offered on the RWM.

The menu was insulting and the army of servers showering the party of six with rapid fire drinks, food, desert along with the check was offending.  What we though would be a hour and half opportunity to visit with golf friends and chat business turned into a very expensive fast food restaurant experience of just over forty five minutes.

The food was a smidgen of a normal proportion on the regular menu and offered with some uncertainty of what came with the entree.  The wines were offered to us at 50% off any bottle under $200..yep, you can guess how many bottles on the list were under $200 or even under $100.

It was clear this one particular restaurant was not really interested in showing us what they had to offer but more on how they could make a buck off the space we were taken up.  Somehow I got the impression this restaurant was really not interested in the marketing, promotions or goodwill the month long campaign was about, but rather they were looking to profit as much as they could off people lured in for the $35 meal.

So now the questions are..

Is Restaurant Week really what it is made out to be?  Do the participants really get to see more than just the inside of a upscale restaurant?  Is the upscale restaurant industry in denial there is a recession?

We have one more restaurant on the Restaurant Week program to partake..hopefully this one will be different, but expect it will not.