Thursday, August 22, 2013

restaurant week

I list my favorite blogs over there on the right so that I can go read them. Most post once or twice a week, a few every day and one several times a day - that’s Vegas Chatter which a few days ago posted about Restaurant Week here in Las Vegas. This is a yearly event that quite a few restaurants participate in. Each restaurant creates a special fixed price menu for the event (in addition to their regular menu) and when you order from it they make a donation to our local organization Three Square which provides meals and a food bank. It’s been going on for several years, and I usually find out about it when it’s over.

Last year I found out early and was able to grab a reservation at Andre’s – a place I have wanted to try since we moved here. We had a great time, and the fixed price meal was about half the price of ordering full menu items, so it did get us into a fancy place to try it out for a lot less money. This year I found out ahead of time, and so made two reservations; one for lunch at MOzen Bistro in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and later in the week for dinner at Jean Georges in Aria. We’ve heard about how good the restaurants at City Center are but have not taken the time to find out, so this motivated me to jump into two places.

Las Vegas probably has more fancy restaurants than almost any other city, and from what we hear it’s a lot less expensive to eat here than almost anywhere else. I didn’t realize that until I started hearing what it costs in other big cities. I did notice our hotel rates can be a lot cheaper than California hotels – when we recently visited San Francisco and San Diego the room rates for some not so very nice places were much more than we have paid for fancy suites at the big hotels here. Granted, here we can pick the slow times when rates are low and had specific stays laid out in California, but I don’t think most places have hotels that change their rates nightly based on occupancy or planned occupancy the way Vegas hotels do.

So I figured that perhaps it would be nice to try some of these places that we live near, and pretend we are tourists at least for a couple of hours. Now that we’re getting older I find the fun things my wife and I enjoy doing are more like a quiet evening in a nice restaurant than getting drunk at a noisy club. (well, never liked doing that anyway).

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bonjour Joe !

C'est une belle action que vous faites à travers la Banque Alimentaire pour aider les plus démunis.
Cet événement au restaurant qui permet de faire des dons, c'est très bien !!!
Un bon repas, de bons moments et l'aide aux personnes qui en ont besoin... tout cela est très généreux !

BISES et bonne continuation à Las Vegas !!!

angryparsnip said...

What a super great idea.
Can't wait to hear if you liked the food.
We have something like that in Tucson where the restaurants in our low season when all the snow birds have gone home (summer hot hot summer) run local specials. It is so much fun to go out and about to try different places.

cheers, parsnip

Duncan D. Horne - the Kuantan blogger said...

I had a chuckle when I read about Andre's. There is a famous comedy in England called Fawlty Towers which features a restaurant, if I'm not mistaken, named Andre's!
Duncan In Kuantan

Anonymous said...

Un petit bonjour chez toi en ce dimanche matin !!!!

Je t'embrasse bien fort !!!

Blond Duck said...

I just tried a great new bbq place here-- must be a time for new delicious restaurants!

elizabeth said...

Good thinking!
Yes, Restaurant week is a really good time to get into swanky places for a much more modest amount!
In NYC you have to book fast so as not to get excluded!

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