SFist Tonight
Week Around the Ists
SFist Tonight
The Week Ahead: Bay Area Concerts 11/23 - 11/29
BART Cop Smashes Drunk Dude's Head Through Glass
If you're like us, you're sick of hearing about the stock market, the housing bust, layoffs, and other things that make it seem like we're reliving the early part of the Bush years. On the other hand, conditions like this make for good recession specials, and we're going to be pretty stoked to check out OpenTable's Appetite Stimulus Plan. The details are simple - a bunch of restaurants that you can't afford are part of it. $24 for lunch, $35 for dinner, prix fixe. Tonight and tomorrow night are the last nights, so get out there and pork out.
Stimulate Yourself. Eat Cheap.
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that youtube video has been yanked by the user who posted it... here's another version of it (looks
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Sounds more like an OpenTable Stimulus Plan. Check out Brett Emerson's write-up about how OpenTable makes money.
I didn't know much about how OT makes money, but if you read through the comments on Brett's excellent writeup, there's a great discussion of the pros/cons of OT, from all sides.
I still can't afford. :-/
^ Seriously. $35 for dinner is affordable?
I can live off 35$ for a week!
OT rocks. From a consumer's perspective, not waiting is a good thing. It also allows me to browse around and figure out what's available, rather than getting a hair up my ass about a particular restaurant and being disappointed when it's packed.
Also, we tend to get a $50 check from those guys about every two months (we look for the special 1000 pt reservations sometimes).
Now that I'm older, I can afford eating out at pricier restaurants now, so I do. If I were still just out of school, yeah, $35 would be a hit to my cash-flow, for sure. Patience -- financial security comes with age. Usually. Unless Bush is president, but I digress.
However, I really dislike these big promotional city-wide events. They tend to clog up these restaurants with folks who normally don't go, take up a lot of time with the wait-staff, and generally slow down the service for everyone. Dine-around-Town creates a similar phenomenon , and the servers don't necessarily enjoy it either. You get a group of 5-6 folks, they're *ALL* drinking water, and they plonk down a 10% tip off of the sale price.
Folks, these high-end restaurants have career servers. They chose that line of work because of many reasons, but a lot of them have incredible customer-service and food service backgrounds. It's really bad form to chintz out on those types of professionals. A pro at Slanted Door is going to be a different class of service than the guy at the Tenderloin Pho shop, ya dig?
$35 for a three course meal at the restaurants participating (at least the one's I'm familiar with) is a deal. Not a deal I'm going to take advantage of though. I'm trying to be very wise with my cash right now and my already cut down to once a month fine dining plan is being replaced by Thanksgiving this month.