{"id":260,"date":"2005-06-15T14:13:21","date_gmt":"2005-06-15T22:13:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2005\/06\/why_restaurant_week_is_like_crack.html"},"modified":"2008-01-25T13:35:52","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T18:35:52","slug":"why_restaurant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/06\/why_restaurant.html","title":{"rendered":"Why Restaurant Week Is Like Crack"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Times&#8217; deceptive headline &#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/06\/15\/dining\/15week.html\">&#8220;For 20 Bucks, Is It Worth It?&#8221;<\/a> &#8212; refers not to the sometimes disappointing &#8220;cheap week&#8221; chickensalmoncaesarsalad offerings but rather whether the <em>restaurants<\/em> think it&#8217;s worth it. Whose side are they on anyway?<\/p>\n<p>So they lose money on truffles and fresh morels &#8212; what happened to a sense of civic duty? Some of us treat Restaurant Week as a rare opportunity to experience &#8212; Bowdlerized, no matter! &#8212; places commoners can&#8217;t afford or can&#8217;t often afford! A culinary bleacher seat, as it were.  That&#8217;s why stuff like this makes me feel lazy about wanting to take a long lunch:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>David Waltuck, the chef and an owner of Chanterelle, said he uses ingredients that are &#8220;maybe a little less expensive&#8221; like chicken or salmon during the Restaurant Week lunch rush. &#8220;I wouldn&#8217;t do calves&#8217; liver or tripe or a strong fish,&#8221; he said.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sure, skimp on the liver because it&#8217;s too much of an &#8220;acquired taste.&#8221; Harrumph! The question is whether Restaurant Week is worth it to the consumer! Yet the Times wants us to believe that restauranteurs are somehow magnanimous about it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>&#8220;When I called my fish guy last year and told him I wanted to do halibut for Restaurant Week, he told me to put down my crack pipe,&#8221; said Alexandra Guarnaschelli, chef at Butter on Lafayette Street. But her grilled halibut with squash emulsion flew out of the kitchen and became a house favorite.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So an open call to establishments participating in Restaurant Week: Pick up the damn crack pipe already! We&#8217;re still going to come &#8212; it&#8217;s addictive!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Times&#8217; deceptive headline &#8212; &#8220;For 20 Bucks, Is It Worth It?&#8221; &#8212; refers not to the sometimes disappointing &#8220;cheap week&#8221; chickensalmoncaesarsalad offerings but rather whether the restaurants think it&#8217;s worth it. Whose side are they on anyway? So they lose money on truffles and fresh morels &#8212; what happened to a sense of civic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}