Delicacies
Seven days of deals
By Shi Yingying (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-02-27 07:58
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Restaurant-goers are offered exclusive menus with a wide diversity of cuisines during Shanghai Restaurant Week. Provided to China Daily |
Shanghai
Eat your way across the city as restaurants woo new customers in unison. Shi Yingying reports.
It's the week that never ends. Shanghai Restaurant Week can make a hungry miser's dreams come true, and that means meals at dozens of the best restaurants in the city are available for a steal.
From March 7 until March 13, Shanghai is following in New York's footsteps with a week of bargain menus.
Even if you're eyeing the fancy three-course lunch at the Strip Steakhouse or the elegant dinner with a view of the Bund at Nougatine, Restaurant Week offers the fixed prices at 78 yuan ($12) or 118 yuan for lunch and 168 yuan or 248 yuan for dinner. That's about half - or even a third - of the normal price.
"It's the opportunity for restaurants to get new guests walking into their doors - it's not the time for restaurants to make money out of it," says Onno Schreurs from Dining City, one of the organizers that put together the event. "Some of the restaurants are actually losing money during the week because they give more than what it costs."
However, "once a restaurant participates in the Restaurant Week, it will always stay with us", Schreurs says, judging by the figures of reservations for the first two restaurant weeks held last year.
"We received over 3,000 online reservations for the first Restaurant Week last April and 4,000 for the second one last September," he says. "It's not difficult to break the record this time."
Restaurant Week is a challenge for the chef. "Some of the chefs said, 'No, we can't go so low with the price' and I told them, 'You're not creative enough then'," Schreurs says.
For many restaurant-goers in the city, the event is also the first sign of spring. The seven-day promotion marks "the end of winter", according to Kris Kaminsky, executive assistant manager of food and beverage at the Portman Ritz-Carlton. His Palladio Italian Restaurant won last year's Restaurant Week Award.
Coming from the United States, Kaminsky is no stranger to the concept of Restaurant Week, but the story might be a little new for Chinese. The world's first Restaurant Week was started back in New York in 1992, offering three-course lunches for $19.92 at the participating group of fine-dining restaurants.
Its success spawned similar promotions across the US and beyond. Scores of cities and regions like London and Lisbon ate up the concept.
Twenty-five of the city's top restaurants participated the first Restaurant Week, says Siem Bierman, director of Dining City, despite the short time span and low advertising budget. "People loved it," he says. This year, 53 restaurants signed up the event, and many of them designed an exclusive menu for the week-long promotion.
Compared with last year's events, the roster this year draws a fuller culinary arc by including restaurants like Maggie's, where the food is inventive modern Chinese, and Pelham's at the Waldorf Astoria, a newly opened New York-style eatery. The wide diversity of cuisines means that diners can try everything from traditional fine dining to modern Chinese and Japanese food.
"In Shanghai, people are still very conscious of what they're paying for a meal," says 27-year-old food writer Shen Sijia. "It's difficult to start a high-end restaurant, which is why they want to promote the experience of fine dining and help restaurants attract a more diverse clientele."
High-end dining venues are starting to promote themselves more often in activities such as Restaurant Week and Hungry Monday (a special deal offered on the Monday, since restaurants usually have least volume of traffic on the first day of the week)," she says.
Bierman agrees and says the Shanghainese's attitude toward fine dining is "curious but confused". "It's easy for them to pay hundreds of yuan to get a drink at the bar, but they wouldn't pay that much for a decent lunch," he says. Bierman is glad to see that over 70 percent of the reservations have come from Chinese, judging from the names that have been left for reservation.
Reservations for Restaurant Week can be made through the Dining City website www.diningcity.com. But you'd better to be quick.
(China Daily 02/27/2011 page13)
