Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Silicon Valley Restaurant Week ~ April 30 to May 7
The biannual Silicon Valley Restaurant Week is back starting one week from today! 50 restaurants will be offering 3-course fixed price meals at reasonable prices. San Jose is heavily represented with 11 Downtown restaurants and 8 others from across the city. Some of my favorites are on the list like Arcadia, The Table, Hay Market, LB Steak, and Fahrenheit. You can even get a free ride from uber to your dining establishment of choice. To see the full list of restaurants and book a table, just head over to the Silicon Valley Restaurant Week website.
The idea of "Restaurant Week" just plain doesn't work in Silicon Valley.
ReplyDeleteSan Jose has an amazing amount of high-quality inexpensive restaurants from so many countries but very few good, inventive "upper casual"-to-upper restaurants. Showcasing the latter is usually the point of "Restaurant Week" in various cities. Then, on the complete other end, in some of the rich surrounding towns you have a few Michelin-starred places (i.e. Plumed Horse, Manresa) that are already destinations and don't need to be part of RW.
Some of the choices for restaurant week are just an embarrassment. Farmer's Union? Looking at their RW menu...your choices are veggie risotto, a half chicken, a burger, or fish and chips. :-\ That's fine generic pub food, but restaurant week dining? (And at a restaurant that doesn't have the best of reputations, at that)
And the prices for the few high-end ones on here are too expensive to get the casual-to-moderately-pretentious diner interested. I just don't see how paying $45 + tax + tip to go to a restaurant that has very little buzz can turn out to be a good deal at all.
Some of the cheaper ethnic ones look like they're trying to get in on the action, but IMO just aren't well set up for something like this. The set menus look very similar to how much you'd pay if you got each dish individually, but with significantly fewer choices. For instance, look at Faz's RW menu (which isn't my first choice of Mediterranean restaurant to begin with, but anyway). $35 for soup, beef kebabs and a dessert? That's almost MORE expensive than those items individually!
What they should do is take their strengths, and focus on them. Instead of having mediocre, overpriced prix-fixe menus at mediocre overpriced restaurants, they should find a way to highlight some of the inexpensive, delicious ethnic restaurants and maybe advertise certain dishes that they do really well and provide reasons why one should go out of their way for these.