Dining week - does Chicago have such a thing?

On trips to the east in the last year, I have run across Dining week in 2 cities, Syracuse and Philadelphia: participating restaurants offer a prix fixe menu of 3 or 4 courses, with 3 choices, more or less, for each course. In Syracuse it cost $20, maybe more in Phillie, can't recall. Both experiences were quite satisfying.

Does Chicago have anything similar anywhere in the area? Can't remember seeing it, or seeing it discussed here, but it seems a fairly civilized thing, so long as one dines early in the week, because it draws crowds.

Unfortunately, I've never seen such a thing

Man, we really need to get on the ball with this. I would have a field day.

dicksond wrote:Does Chicago have anything similar anywhere in the area? Can't remember seeing it, or seeing it discussed here, but it seems a fairly civilized thing, so long as one dines early in the week, because it draws crowds.

Hey dicksond,

you may have been out of town for this event, which gleam alerted us to:

http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=4752

(Did anyone here take advantage of the special menus?)

Amata

Was this advertised in print anywhere?

NYC has light pole banners advertising Dining Week. I never saw this mentioned anywhere

ChiTownAbs wrote:Was this advertised in print anywhere?

I definitely saw Dine-Out Chicago advertised in most publications (Reader, TimeOut, New City, etc.) but I think it looked more like a Pellegrino ad than an ad for this event.

Best,
Michael

Hi Amata,

We did Cafe Spiaggia on a Friday evening. Beth's brother and I both ordered a la carte, but Beth did the prix fixe. The price was about the same as if she'd ordered the dishes individually, but, hey, $1 to charity.

Two of my favorites tastes from that night were heirloom tomatoes with really, really fresh mozzarella di bufala, and a house-made fennel sorbet. I hadn't rememberd CS having such a massive list of house-made sorbets and gelati. Beth's bricked chicken was very good, but the grilled and thinly sliced zucchini was superb. Really nice smoky squashy flavor.

-ed

Not quite dining week but there were prix fixe offers listed on 877chicago.com
Check this link(now defunct, maybe they'll update)

I also remember $20.0x prix fixe offers were limited to certain menu items only and at some places the waitstaff didn't know they were doing that. It was better to simply order off the menu at the couple of places I went (this was a few years ago and I stopped looking at this offer).

The San Pellegrino program, at least at cafe spiaggia, was well organized. They brought us copies of both the prix-fixe menu and the regular menu. There were, if I remember correctly, 3 choices for each course.

i'm on opentable.com's mailing list... once or twice in the past 2 years I've gotten e-mails about huge pre-fixe events across the city... for a month or so, a bunch of different restaraunts have $20 pre-fixe menus on a certain night.. i don't know if this is an event organized by opentable.com, or if its an event that they're just telling me about... but i did check and there was a pretty long list of restaraunts participating both times..

There have been two opentable prix fixe promotions that I can remember in the past year. The first was opentable promoting the 877-CHICAGO winter prix fixe thing mentioned above, the second was promoting the Pellegrino Dine Out program just last month.

The City's WinterDelights program also has a pre-fixe menu component to it. There were a lot of restaurants participating last year, I haven't heard if they will be doing a similar thing this winter.

Thanks, all. I thought there miht have been something like that with the Winter Delights program but was not sure. Interesting that the pricing on some of this may, in fact, be worse than the normal menu pricing. Guess you have to research before you go.

Ed, when you did Cafe Spiaggia for the Pellegrino deal, did it seem particularly crowded? Just wondering.

dicksond wrote:Ed, when you did Cafe Spiaggia for the Pellegrino deal, did it seem particularly crowded? Just wondering.

Nope. We were there for a 7:45pm friday night reservation and there were open tables throughout our meal. They were probably at 75% capacity, but it wasn't noisy or uncomfortable or anything along those lines.