Gearing up for Denver Restaurant Week 2011

If you're not from around here, or you are but you don't like any restaurants other than Generous Servings, you might not know about Denver Restaurant Week.  It's actually two weeks, during which participating restaurants offer multi-course meals for the "mile-high price" of $52.80 per couple.  Before we go any farther, can I just mention that it's annoying to price a meal per couple?  But $26.40 per person just doesn't roll off the tongue.

Last year Après had been open for only a week when Restaurant Week rolled around, and we were way too disorganized to participate, but we decided we'd do it this year.  It starts tomorrow, and we're all getting a little anxious about how it's going to go.  A lot of other chefs say that it's a nightmare: the customers are "bargain hunting" and so they don't get any extra stuff and they leave bad tips, people get upset when they can't get in, the staff gets exhausted, restaurants poach servers from each other to try to meet the demand, service and quality slip, and by the end of the two weeks half your staff has quit.  Great.  But if you don't participate, you don't have any business, because all the customers are taking advantage of the great deals around town.

So here's hoping that it's fun and we make a lot of new friends.  We've stocked up on everything we can, and we're all psyched up for a big push.  Three hundred and one restaurants are participating this year, so maybe we won't all be very busy.  Supposedly this is the largest Restaurant Week in the country (other cities, like New York and Boston, also have similar events), but I happen to know that 11 of our 301 restaurants are the local Outback Steakhouse locations, so I'm not sure we can count those.

Today I went to the Restaurant Week kick-off press conference.  It was the first press conference I've ever been to, and I have to say I was underwhelmed with the quality of the speeches.  Afterwards they took a picture of a bunch of participating chefs with the mayor.  Check out this picture and see if you notice anything strange (other than the giant wine glass the mayor is holding):

Yes, there are 40 chefs here, and two of them are women (I'm at near the middle, wearing the only blue chef's coat).  When they were organizing us for the picture they called us "gentlemen".  Excuse me.  That means dining at Après, during Restaurant Week or any other time, puts you on the moral high ground as a supporter of gender equality.  Give us a call and make a reservation.  And I know that if you're reading this, you already know this, but please tip well.  Just because we offered you a deal doesn't mean the servers should suffer.  Jill and I are taking ourselves out to two great restaurants that we normally couldn't afford, so maybe we'll see you out there!