Tired of Restaurant Week Criticism - Not About Food - Chowhound
Ok, this is just wrong. There’s another point they make about how the restaurant is losing money merely by participating in RW that also seems wrong on the face of it (if you own a restaurant and you’re losing money serving people food, you’re doing it wrong), but this particular claim really rubs me the wrong way - even though the rest of their list of appalling customer behaviors rings true.
At many restaurants I’ve been to during restaurant week - and many more that I’ve just read the menus for online - the RW menu is just a more limited version of the regular menu, or at least its slightly cheaper cousin. To say the server has never tasted the dishes indicates to me either that the server is lazy or the restaurant is unaccountably cheap. If there are all of three dishes on the RW menu, how much effort can it possibly take to taste them?
That said, we’ve mostly given up on restaurant week anyway. We’ve gone back to places we’d liked in the past, only to have really negative experiences during RW, and have that cast our otherwise favorable impression in new light. We’ve also had good RW experiences, but the median seems to be that the servers are harried, the food is usually decent at a minimum (sometimes very good, occasionally underwhelming), and the savings are made up for by the obvious motive to turn the table for the next seating. This was even true at Las Vegas restaurant week prices ($50 for dinner instead of $30 or $35) - we were overstuffed at Fiamma (which served almost all of the regular menu), underwhelmed at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon (strictly limited menu), and completely delighted at MiX (three options, and seriously, one of the best steaks I’ve ever had, anywhere, at any price). RW in Vegas affords us an extra nice meal in our schedule, but in DC we’d rather wait, save up, and have the full experience.
