What Is Restaurant Week: Why and How to Participate

Are you looking for ways to increase your visibility and attract new clients? Then participating in Restaurant Week may be a good choice for you.

Read on to find out more about this event, its benefits, and some Restaurant Week ideas that will ensure you turn up a profit.

What is Restaurant Week?

Let’s go back to the beginning. In 1992, in New York City, Tim Zagat (founder of Zagat Restaurant Surveys) and restaurateur Joe Baum organized the first Restaurant Week to draw journalists to local food establishments.

As the first event was a success, it has spread all around the United States and even worldwide, in different formats.

In short, Restaurant Week is an event lasting a week or sometimes even more during which participating food businesses create special prix fixe menus that give diners the chance to try different types of food that otherwise would have been out of their budget.

What are the Restaurant Week rules? This is how it is organized:

• The time of the year will depend on the area your restaurant is in. Typically, the Chamber of Commerce or a local tourist board will set the time for the event, recruit participants, and then advertise the promotion to diners;
• Restaurants that take part come up with new prix fixe menus for lunch and dinners, usually at a smaller price compared to their typical menu;
• Diners try to hit as many spots on the list to take advantage of the irresistible offers.

Read more: How & Why to Create a Prix Fixe Menu for Your Restaurant + Useful Tips

Is Restaurant Week worth it?

Participating in Restaurant Week can be a challenge. You have to create new menus that have to be attractive to clients, yet not eat into your profit and you will also struggle to provide excellent customer service when you are hit with an avalanche of clients.

But you also get to enjoy many benefits:

• Increased exposure: if you are the start, being part of Restaurant Week will help you increase awareness about your brand. Even diners who may not get to visit you during the promotions may still remember your delicious-looking food and you on their list for future dining;
• Boost in reputation: if you manage to maintain a high level of service and impress people with the quality of your food, clients will surely recommend your business to friends, family, and even online;
• More new clients: when someone asks, “What is Restaurant Week?”, this is the main benefit that pops up. During the event, you will have a huge increase in the number of customers due to carefully created promotions;
• A chance to win over loyal customers: a new customer can easily become a loyal one if you offer irreproachable food and service and also use some marketing strategies to get them to return.

Read more: How to Increase Customer Loyalty in a Restaurant

Restaurant Week ideas to increase profit

The secret to turning a profit during this event is to pay attention to the details. Here are a few Restaurant Week ideas you must try:

1. Include high-profit menu items in the package deals

When diners visit a restaurant that participates in Restaurant Week, they expect to see a prix fixe menu at an affordable price. Usually, fine dining and other upscale food businesses use this type of menu, but the truth is that any restaurant can have one. It can be as simple as a combo meal.

Because you are creating package deals with a promotion, you are selling the items at a lower price than you would separately. To not let this strategy eat into profit, you must include high-profit margin menu items in the combos.

Here are a couple of examples:

• Drinks: you only have the purchasing price for most of the drinks without any cost of preparation, so the profit margin is quite high;
• Add-ons: give people the possibility to personalize their prix fixe menu by adding toppings;
• Appetizers: with a few quality ingredients and in a small portion to provide exquisite taste at a small price.

Read more: 7 Most Profitable Menu Items to Include in Your Restaurant Menu

2. Make upselling and cross-selling a priority

While customers come in to get the prix fixe menu they were advertised, they can easily be tempted to buy more if the food looks good. The key is to not persist and only make recommendations if the client is open to them.

Here are a few upselling and cross-selling strategies to try:

• Create prix fixe menus for different price points: for example, you can have a fish main for the cheaper one and a steak main for the more expensive one. A mouth-watering picture on the menu may persuade clients to choose the steak;
• Make pairing recommendations for drinks that would go well with the prix fixe menu;
• Tempt customers with dessert at the end of the meal. Servers can spend some time learning the customers’ preferences to make the perfect sweet recommendation.

Read more: 10 Restaurant Upselling Techniques to Increase Daily Profits

3. Take advantage of technology to increase customer satisfaction

Your employees will have a hard time serving a large number of customers, but you can make their jobs easier by leveraging technology. This way, they can concentrate on offering clients an amazing experience they will want to return to.

You will need:

• A table reservation system with an order-ahead feature: to allow diners to secure their spot and not worry about finding a free table or not. With the order-ahead feature, you can allow clients to also choose what they want to eat when they book a table which helps you serve more customers in a day;
• An online ordering system: you can up your sales by making the offers available online as well. If you add an online ordering system to your website, you get the added benefit of increased website traffic which leads to ranking higher in Google searches;
• An online menu creator: creating a new menu is a must for Restaurant Week. If you stick to a traditional paper menu, you not only have to pay for a reprint, but you also risk upsetting customers when you inevitably run out of some ingredients. An online restaurant menu creator enables you to make countless changes free of charge and also mark items as Out of Stock;
• A QR code menu: to make the online menu available for in-location clients, all you have to do is generate a QR code, print it, and stick it on every table. To make operations more efficient, you can also allow customers to order and pay with just a quick scan.

The good news is that you can get all of the above and more with the online ordering system from GloriaFood. Not only is the setup fast (10 minutes maximum), but it is also free. Watch this video to see how easy it is:

4. Use décor to upstage the competition

Diners will visit a variety of food businesses during Restaurant Week, sometimes even more than one a day. This means that your establishment can easily be forgotten if you don’t do something to stand out.

Many restaurants will have good food and service, so what can you do to outshine the competition? Use décor elements to leave a lasting impression! Here are a few Restaurant Week ideas:

• Create a photo corner: themed around your type of cuisine and with your logo in the background. People will be tempted to take selfies and post them online. When they tag your restaurant in the photos, they not only advertise it for free, but they also provide you with user-generated content to boost your reputation;
• Impress with plating technique: another way to get people to take pictures of your food is to learn how to properly plate your dishes so they are aesthetically pleasing;
• Surprise clients with unique elements: for example, you could have a huge pepper shaker you bring to each table or an unlimited amount of cheese topping for pasta.

5. Offer coupons for future purchases

You have a variety of new clients visiting you for Restaurant Week. Don’t let them be just a one-time visitor, convince them to come back. A great way to do so is to offer them a coupon for future purchases.

For example, you could give each table a flyer with 5% off their first online order to also promote your delivery service. You can create such a coupon in seconds with GloriaFood:

Read more: How to Create Restaurant Coupon Codes for Discounts and Special Offers

Final words

Now you no longer have to wonder what Restaurant Week is. You know the event’s rules, and benefits and you also have the knowledge to take advantage of the promotion to increase your profit. All there is left to do is to find out when Restaurant Week will take place in your area and sign up.