Ann Arbor Restaurant Week Is Coming. Should You Participate? Yes and No.

IN CASE YOU haven’t noticed, January 12-17 is Ann Arbor Restaurant Week, an event put on by the Main Street Area Association. It’s the fifth winter Ann Arbor Restaurant Week, and 57 restaurants are participating; that’s up from 26 restaurants participating in 2010. The participating venues will offer “a $15.00 lunch and some restaurants are offering two-for-one pricing.” A three-course dinner during the week at participating restaurants will set you back $28.00. That’s up from 2010, as well. In fact Restaurant Week prices have risen sharply. The cost of a Restaurant Week lunch has gone up 25 percent since 2010, and the cost of a dinner has jumped 12 percent. Both increases are well above cumulative cost of living increases over the course of the past 36 months.

So, am I just a cheapskate, or is $28 bucks for dinner per person way too rich for your blood, as well? If we take the kids (crazy, I know) that’s $112 for dinner for four during Restaurant Week. Then there’s the knowledge that from January 24-February 5, 2014 there is Restaurant Week in Chicago. Dinners at dozens of the best restaurants in Chi-town are priced at $33 per person. Yes, $33, up from $32 in 2011. Just so you know, the average bill for dining out nationally is $33.60, according to Zagat.

Here’s my advice. Unless you’re going to a restaurant that offers a two-fer at lunch, Ann Arbor Restaurant Week is still little more than an unimaginative marketing ploy to get people to go to participating downtown restaurants, to eat the same items off the regular menus, and pay virtually the same prices. It’s not a week of eating out at uniformly discounted prices as touted on the Ann Arbor Restaurant Week website. It could be, but it’s not and that’s a crying shame, because according to Zagat (again) eating out in the U.S. is down 41 percent over last year. If my business was down that much, I’d be coming up with some supremely creative marketing, not the kind served up during the Ann Arbor Restaurant Week.

Do those in charge of the Main Street Area Association really think diners are this naive or prepared to drop over $100 for dinner out on Main Street? Townies inclined to participate in Ann Arbor Restaurant Week—and you should participate—would do well to eat dinner at home. Think how much take-out food $28 per person will buy you, and you have all those Netflix movies to watch, right?

Someone needs to tell the folks at the Main Street Association, and the owners of the eateries participating in Ann Arbor Restaurant Week offering the $28.00 dinners, that the median household income in Michigan is 34th in the nation. The truth is that $28.00 for a salad, entreé and dessert isn’t what most people are looking to pay.  It’s not a price point good enough for me to encourage people to drive downtown, pay $1.50 per hour to park, then walk to dinner just so restaurant owners can fill the seats. Plus, the big ego, over-inflated dinner pricing structure completely shuts out families from participating in Restaurant Week, for crepes sake.

You’ll find me having lunch with a friend at the Lena and Conor O’Neill’s next week. Join us, why don’t you? Here’s a list of some of the local restaurants that are offering two-for-one lunches during Restaurant Week:

• Amadeus
• Arbor Brewing Company
• The Blue Nile
• Blue Tractor
• Cafe Habana
• Conor O’Neill’s
• Grizzly Peak
• Kuroshio
• Marnee Thai
• Miki Japanese Restaurant
• The Original Cottage Inn
• Sava’s

What with the cumulative 25 percent hike in Restaurant Week lunch prices over the past three years, eateries are coming close to pricing themselves right out of what I would consider a reasonable price to pay for the overall quality of food, service and ambiance served up. There are some exceptions, including Mani, but as always it’s caveat emptor epicurians.