Chefs Sound Off on Seattle Restaurant Week
“It’s a necessary evil I hope to not be doing in a few years.”
Posted by: Seattle Met Staff on Oct 18, 2011 at 12:25PM
2 Comments
As part of Seattle Met ‘s Best Restaurants feature, we asked dozens of Seattle chefs and restaurateurs to give us their take on trends, customers, competition—pretty much everything under the restaurant sun. What we got was an earful of juicy insider insight. We’ll be posting some of the responses here in the coming weeks.
The bi-annual Seattle Restaurant Week got underway this past weekend and we’re already hearing rumblings. So what better time to present results from this question: Which best captures your feelings about Restaurant Week and Dine Around Seattle?
25 percent
Love ’em! “We get [customers] in the door, give them a good experience, and they come back.”
25 percent
Loathe ’em “It’s dumbing down your food for people who don’t want to spend the money.”
20 percent
Restaurant Week: yes, Dine Around: no “The 10 days of Restaurant Week don’t burn your staff out, but those month-long things are painful.”
8 percent
Good for business, but grueling “It’s a necessary evil I hope to not be doing in a few years.”
8 percent
Doesn’t ultimately increase business “Same with the coupons: It brings in people who are after a deal, and those are not your repeat customers.”
8 percent
We can’t afford it “We’re a small restaurant with a small kitchen, and it’s hard to do things the way we want when we’re slammed.”
4 percent
If we don’t do it, we have no business that week “You’re over a barrel.”
Tags: Dining-World Drama, Seattle Chefs, Seattle Restaurant Culture
it is a good opportunity to impress new guests and get a lot of people out dining which will never be a bad thing for our restaurant community. It is harder on the smaller restaurants that’s why restaurant week is only 10 days as opposed to Dine Around which is a full month.
Dump Dine Around, it sucks. Restaurant Week is cool.