The concept of Restaurant Week is simple! Local restaurants band together, often in conjunction with the area convention and visitors bureau and sometimes their local restaurant association, to plan a week-long fixed-price meal. Participants pay a fee to cover promotional and advertising costs, and sponsors are often solicited for financial and additional promotional contributions.
New York, Chicago, Boston, Denver, San Diego, Miami, Atlanta and Philadelphia are a few of more than 26 major cities nationwide, plus a growing number of smaller communities, hosting restaurant weeks. In addition to showcasing a city’s great dining options, restaurant weeks spur both locals and out-of-town diners to revisit old favorites and, best of all, try new places.
Sound like a daunting undertaking? San Diego restaurateurs organized their first restaurant week in 2002 – in less than four months – and made a critical and financial splash.
Credit Ingrid Croce, owner of Croce’s (named for her late husband, the popular singer, Jim Croce). Croce, a fireball of energy and enthusiasm and relentless city booster, spearheaded San Diego’s first such effort, using New York as a template. It helps that San Diego has a lively restaurant scene. The city has experienced a renaissance in dining and culture over the past 30 years that parallels the community’s growth. Still, its culinary profile is not as strong as many would like, and Croce is determined to change that. She sees restaurant week as a key tool in that effort. “People are hungry; they want to know where to eat and whether the value is there and this is an opportunity to showcase our bounty,” she notes. “And people who would never drive from downtown to another community will venture out (San Diego’s event is spread out over the vast county) because they realize it’s a value and they’re prepared for good dining. “With the ‘Taste of’ events of the past, people who went to those wouldn’t necessarily go back to the restaurants they sampled,” Croce says. Restaurants participating in the week-long promotion, however, attract guests who dine out all the time but don’t get to try all the restaurants they want to try, she adds. “This focuses people on dining out for an entire week.” Croce, who headed up the 30-person restaurant committee devoted to the week for the San Diego Restaurant Association, together with San Diego Magazine and CONVIS (the marketing arm of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau), worked to get 75 restaurants on board the first year and organized in the brief time. Business partners included American Express, Costco, U.S. Foods and a local car company. They planned and executed six nights of dining (three courses, three options per course) for $30 per person January 30 through February 4. Participating restaurants paid an entry fee of $5,000, with a food distributor offering each establishment $500- $1000 toward the cost of food.
Restaurateurs originally balked at steep entry fees, but organizers used the money to cover high advertising and promotion costs. One reason New York pushed for two and now four weeks of restaurant week was to give restaurants more mileage out of their advertising and promotion efforts. In San Diego, the promoters mounted a dedicated website (www.sandiegorestaurantweek.com) as well.
Croce reports the promotion was a great success, and a second restaurant week is in the works for next January. Ingrid Croce is also publishing an accompanying cookbook, The San Diego Restaurant Cookbook and to use as a promotional tool for their next event.
Quoted from The Genius of Restaurant Week by Patricia Hochwarth
The History of “The Restaurant Week Travel Show™”
To say it is hard to bring restaurateurs together for a “common good” is an understatement. But to bring them concurrently together to join Convention and Visitor Bureaus throughout the State of California is ludicrous. Or is it?
Ingrid Croce has spent a quarter of a decade building her business and the relationships that have made this dream a reality and now a “reality show”.
It all comes together on “The Restaurant Week Travel Show™”, with Ingrid Croce hosting value propositions for travel, food, live music, merchandise and fun that are hard to resist! (Book your reservations now!)
For Ingrid, the opportunity to develop Restaurant Week in San Diego started in 2004 when she led to an amazingly successful premier event that helped boost San Diego to the top 10 “must visit cities” in the world. (Conde Nast Travel). She has also has united restaurateurs, Convention and Visitor Bureaus and Travel experts in an unprecedented union that offers guests the best prices at the best restaurants in the world!
In January 2007 250,000 diners in San Diego enjoyed 150 restaurants for a week long dining event at the city’s top restaurants. The event is still growing! And now participating restaurants can join Restaurant Week twice a year. In addition, several of these dining establishments have decided to continue their success and are offering their guests three-course dinners at $30 or $40 all year long!*
The SDRW continues to spark media, visitor and local attention, keeping San Diego’s dining scene on the map of top dining destinations in the world and it is San Diego’s most successful dining event in history! (See article)
Ingrid’s part as Founding Chair of the Restaurant Week Committee and in the development of the dining community started almost a quarter century ago when she opened Croce’s Restaurant and Jazz Bar as a tribute to her late husband singer-songwriter Jim Croce. Back in 1985, in the dilapidated Historic Gaslamp District of downtown San Diego, she admits, “People thought I was crazy.”
But today, as one of just a couple restaurateurs that dared to go downtown before the Convention Center expanded, San Diego’s first downtown shopping mall, Horton Plaza, was completed and long before PetCo Ballpark went in just blocks from Croce’s Restaurant and Jazz Bar, Croce’s is still alive and thriving!
And Ingrid Croce’s Restaurant and Jazz Bar is smack dab in the heart of it all, in the center of the city’s dining and entertainment district.
It is not a surprise that 85% of Ingrid Croce’s business is visitors, conventioneers and Jim Croce fans that make her restaurant and Jazz bar a “must visit” San Diego destination, just a little smaller than the San Diego Zoo and Sea World.
