Summer Menus...from City Business

[RouxTheDay]

FROM CITY BUSINESS

Restaurants stray from standard menus, offer specials to survive slow summer
by Emilie Bahr Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS - Lunch for four at Galatoire’s one recent weekday started with tomato and watermelon salad and cold avocado vichyssoise, served around the sunny window table once favored by Tennessee Williams.

Entrees consisted of grilled Gulf fish over smothered okra, salade niçoise and a croque monsieur. Caramel custard rounded out the three-course meal, part of a new summer business lunch menu the restaurant rolled out in June.

The offerings are new to the 103-year-old French Quarter standard bearer, where pride is taken in a menu that never changes and a cuisine that has withstood the test of time.

The price tag is another novelty: $23 per person, significantly less than many of the entrees on the restaurant’s year-round menu and roughly the pre-tax-and-tip equivalent of specials available at other high-end, tourism-dependent restaurants around town this time of year.

Summer is a prime time for deals in New Orleans, a season in which much of the city goes on sale as all but locals and the most hardy of out-of-towners scatter with the arrival of the city’s infamous heat and humidity.

Few places is this more evident than among certain New Orleans restaurants, many of which offer summer specials to lure in business during what is often the toughest time of the year.

“Of this there is no question,” CityBusiness restaurant critic Tom Fitzmorris wrote recently. “The summer is a great time to dine out because tables are easy to come by and you will be welcomed very warmly.”

Galatoire’s General Manager Chris Ycaza said the restaurant’s new summer menu is designed to give Executive Chef Brian Landry “a little bit of a creative outlet” while helping lure in “every bit of business” possible.

“July and August are usually the two toughest months,” Ycaza said. “By September, the locals are back from their vacations, they’ve put their kids back in school and they start to dine again. The heat starts to get mitigated. The conventions start to come in. It’s a natural cycle, but the summer’s tough.”

Last summer was the slowest for some city restaurants in 20 years, said Wendy Waren, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Restaurant Association. It remains to be seen how significant a toll this year’s record high fuel prices and general economic uneasiness will exact on restaurants’ bottom lines, but Waren and other industry representatives are hopeful people forgoing costly vacations this summer will opt to splurge by dining out.

In the meantime, restaurants are doing what they can to cope with the summer doldrums.

July heralded the start of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau’s COOLinary New Orleans promotion, which runs through Aug. 31. More than 30 restaurants are participating in the campaign in its fourth run this summer, agreeing to offer three-course meals at $20 or less for lunch and $30 or less for dinner. A list of participating restaurants is available at http://www.coolinaryneworleans.com.

Others restaurants are offering their own brand of summer special. Ralph Brennan’s Red Fish Grill, for one, is offering a $25, three-course “grilling & chilling” dinner menu for the first time this summer, following what Charlee Williamson, Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group executive vice president, describes as successful summer promotions held previously at other company restaurants.

“We’re giving up margin, obviously, by bundling and packaging items,” Williamson said, “but people tend to buy up. They’re ordering an extra glass of wine with dinner or a bottle for the table, so that helps boost the check average. It is definitely a tool to drive people in when they’re feeling some hurt in their pocketbooks.”

At Ralph Brennan’s Bacco, where special prices and menus are offered as an enticement to get people in the door for early summer dinners, it is easy to measure the positive impact, Williamson said.

“We don’t typically see the kind of traffic we see with the promotion,” offered between 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. nightly through the end of August, she said. “In excess of 30 percent of our dinner guests are currently ordering the promotional menu. To have 30 percent to come in before 7:30, that’s really big.”

Beyond the immediate business generated, Williamson said summer promotions are aimed at attracting return customers throughout the rest of the year.

“It’s an opportunity for people to try out the restaurant with a pretty low investment,” she said. Based on a good experience, “they might think of us for other special occasions.”•

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http://www.chowhound.com/topics/525408

http://neworleans.com/index.php?option= ... 1&catid=55

the above links to postings about other restaurants offering their Summer Menus...Summer Special, Some are Not. be sure to check for hours and days of the offering