How To Organize A Truly Successful Restaurant Week (Plus A Chance To Win A Restaurant Review Dinner For Two)

What if you held a Restaurant Week and nobody came? Restaurant Weeks are a relatively recent development in the Nutmeg State, and they’re multiplying like mad. Some have been wildly successful, others somewhat successful, still others negligibly successful.

The origin of the Restaurant Week concept can be traced to the Democratic National Convention held in New York in 1992. The idea was hatched by the late restaurateur Joseph Baum (a Cornell University Hotel School graduate famous for creating themed restaurants like The Four Seasons Restaurant and Windows on the World) and by Zagat Survey founder Tim Zagat (whom I worked for as the editor of the Westchester County edition for a couple of years but have never met).

Since no one in Connecticut has more experience with Restaurant Weeks than I, since I am fortunate enough to have a pulpit from which I can preach, and since readers count on me to tell it exactly like it is, I’m going to set forth what I believe goes into creating a successful Restaurant Week.

Close followers of this blog know that I recently donated my time and expertise to help create a Restaurant Week in Hamden, the town in which I grew up and currently reside. Hamden was a town which many people overlooked, but it had a handful of fine restaurants which deserved greater attention. Promoting them proved to be an incredibly rewarding experience. Working with newly elected Mayor Scott Jackson and Nancy Dudchik of the Hamden Chamber of Commerce, I was able to shape a Restaurant Week for which people came from near and far, turning out in droves. Several restaurants had lines out the door almost every night. One 55- seat restaurant did an amazing 1,700 covers in seven days, and almost 300 in one night.

Still, realistically, there are at least a dozen towns in Connecticut with better restaurant scenes than Hamden’s, and yet only a couple of Restaurant Weeks that have worked as well. It’s not that I want to call on the carpet the creators of disappointing Restaurant Weeks, but some are clearly not organizing these events effectively. I suppose no one really gets hurt, but if a Restaurant Week produces only a modest and momentary bump in business, then limited town, chamber and other resources clearly could have been better utilized.

One of my major concerns about Restaurant Weeks is the tendency to select too high a price point. New Haven (November 7-12) is the one town that has become such a dining destination that it seems able to thrive with a price point of $29. Even so, one suspects that only top-tier restaurants are reaping the full benefits of that price point. It’s difficult for a medium-priced restaurant to compete for customers with a Union League Café, a Bespoke, or an Ibiza Restaurant. Mid-level restaurants do benefit from the spillover of jam-packed restaurants, but I would suggest that the best way for them to compete is to up the value they provide by including an extra course or glass of beer or wine.

The Taste of Hartford and Connecticut Restaurant Week (in the past) had stuck to a $20 price point, and that is what I advocate for the Nutmeg State. If top-flight restaurants like Peppercorn’s, Dish Bar & Grill, Morton’s Steakhouse, Feng Asian Bistro, Carbone’s, Mickey’s and Park Central Tavern can manage that price point, any Connecticut restaurant probably can. I consider higher price points ill-advised.

Any restaurateur who says he can’t create an interesting three-course menu for $20 off of which he can still make a little money is either being disingenuous or may be losing his edge. The real question for a restaurateur is, would you rather have a modest surge in business at a higher profit margin or lines out the door with a lower profit margin? Restaurateurs I talked to who stuck to a $20 price point scoffed at the notion that anyone would lose money—some experienced the best weeks they had ever had. And none lost sight of the fact that a high percentage of their customers were new customers, giving them an unbeatable chance to expand their customer bases.

In Fairfield County, there has been a tendency to price Restaurant Weeks too high. I checked out South Norwalk on a week night during SoNo Restaurant Week, which used a bifurcated $20 and $30 price structure for dinner, and I couldn’t even tell that there was a special promotion going on. Presumably, participating restaurants drew better later in the week. I talked to one major restaurateur, and that individual was pleased to have had 30 people the night before, a ripple compared to the tidal wave of business experienced during other promotions. And obviously, one was left wondering why the promotion didn’t encompass all of Norwalk?

I’m going to set forth my rules for doing a Restaurant Week right. Why should I give away “the keys to the city”? Because when a Restaurant Week is done right, everyone who participates benefits. But let me also warn: It’s one thing to understand the rules, but it’s another to have the mental toughness and consensus-building skills to implement them.

Suggestions For A Successful Restaurant Week:

1. Start by forming a tight exploratory committee that includes town leadership, chamber leadership and three or four influential restaurateurs.

2. Make sure you can sign up enough good restaurants to make the event appealing—if you can’t do the event right, don’t do it at all.

3. Plan on doing real footwork to convince restaurateurs that effective participation should bring them real publicity, new customers, rejuvenated old customers, a big spike in business during the event, and hopefully, raised business afterward.

4. Make sure you have lined up the resources necessary to generate press releases, an effective website or web page, attractive signage, and so on.

5. Charge restaurants a participation fee that’s substantial enough to cover most of your promotional costs—you can charge less for lunch-only participants.

6. Collect participation fees far enough in advance so that you don’t wind up promoting for free ambivalent restaurants that you wind up dropping.

7. Consider a publicity-generating kickoff event, involving local celebrities, creating commercial tie-ins that will benefit retailers, and so on.

8. Keep things simple—the public doesn’t handle complicated messages well.

9. Stick primarily to the three-course, prix-fixe format, preferably with just one price point for lunch and one for dinner.

10. Establish a price point that’s so low people will turn out in droves (in today’s Connecticut, I recommend $20 for dinner).

11. Don’t overly democratize the organizational process, but rather form strong leadership that gets as many of the restaurants on the same page as possible, and then forget the rest—if the event is a great success, they’ll probably join next time.

12. Plan to spend time and energy keeping after the participating restaurateurs, who as a group are some of the busiest and hardest-working people on earth.

13. Encourage participating restaurants to offer value that, separately billed, exceeds the prix-fixe price by at least $10 per person.

14. Warn restaurateurs to plan carefully their staffing adjustments (hostesses, servers, cooks and dishwashers), supply orders, dishware available, and so on.

15. Tell restaurateurs they shouldn’t reduce portion size one iota (remind them that the mission is to expand their customer bases).

16. Encourage restaurateurs not to dumb their menus down, but to make sure they’re enticing (but also representative).

17. Advise restaurateurs to include a vegetarian starter and main course.

18. Make certain all menus are posted to the Restaurant Week website well in advance of the event.

19. Promote the event widely through various news media and through social media; encourage restaurants to promote it through their own websites, advertising and social media.

20. Employ plenty of visible signage around town and at the participating eateries.

21. Require participating restaurants to hand out Restaurant Week menus at the same time they hand out regular menus (some may even elect to offer only their Restaurant Week menu).

22. Stay disciplined—insist that restaurateurs uphold the standards you set or you’ll regrettably be forced to drop them from further participation.

The following photos show what a Restaurant Week should look like. If you think you know your way around Connecticut’s restaurants (hint: check our archives, if you get stuck), be the first to identify all of the restaurants shown and win a restaurant review with your date and one of our critics!