SFist: Stimulate Yourself. Eat Cheap.

phlavor

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:40:36 -0800

$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.

HHumbert

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:38:40 -0800

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?

sf_bikebike

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:48:17 -0800

I can live off 35$ for a week!

zstone

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:59:52 -0800

^ Seriously. $35 for dinner is affordable?

withak

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:35:16 -0800

I still can't afford. :-/

SFist_Dan

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:03:15 -0800

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.

Noe Valley SF

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:31:54 -0800

Sounds more like an OpenTable Stimulus Plan. Check out Brett Emerson's write-up about how OpenTable makes money.