Around the country, Restaurant Weeks — where select restaurants in a given city or town offer special menus and deals — are going COVID-friendly.
For example, New York City has just extended its Restaurant Week To Go, an off-premises-only version of the event, for an additional four weeks, reported Eater. The program, originally set to run from Jan. 25 to 31, has been extended through the end of February, as restaurants continue to offer their special-edition lunches and dinners available for takeout and delivery for $20.21. In fact, 9 out of 10 of participating restaurants have extended their Restaurant Week To Go offerings, a testament to the event’s success. On the restaurants’ side, NYC & Company, the New York City tourism company behind the event, has lowered the barrier of entry this year, waiving the participation fee so that more restaurants can join in, according to Patch.
New York is not the only city taking advantage of the Restaurant Week format to showcase restaurants’ pandemic-safe dining options. In Michigan, Ann Arbor Restaurant Week, which will run February 21-26, will offer consumers the choice to dine in, order out, or most distinctively, take a class, according to MLive.com. The classes feature Zoom cooking demonstrations and prerecorded video tutorials, for which participants buy meal kits from Ann Arbor restaurants.
Chicago’s Restaurant Week meanwhile, which is slated for March 19 to April 4, highlights the flexibility of restaurant offerings based on consumers’ comfort level, reported the Chicago Sun Times. Participating restaurants will offer consumers the choice between indoor dining, outdoor dining, takeout and delivery. Washington, D.C.’s RW-to-Go, running now, offers fixed-price group meals to-go for two or for four, and Virginia Beach Restaurant Week, also running now, has added takeout family meals for COVID-conscious customers.
Restaurants can take advantage of the platform Restaurant Week offers to bring attention to their pandemic-friendly dining offerings beyond the standard takeout and delivery options. Fully 63 percent of the $769 billion consumers spent on restaurants in 2020 was used for takeout orders, according to the PYMNTS Delivering On Restaurant Rewards study. Importantly, 89 percent of that takeout spend happened on digital channels, and the average quick-service restaurant (QSR) customer spent 51 percent more on food they ordered to eat at home than on food they ordered to eat on-site. Additionally, the average sit-down restaurant customer spent 36 percent more on food ordered online or over the phone for takeout or delivery than on food eaten on premises.
Given these findings, Restaurant Week events provide a key opportunity to point consumers to mobile ordering apps and loyalty programs. According to the PYMNTS Restaurant Readiness Index, more than 90 percent of the top-performing restaurants right now have loyalty programs, and 39 percent of restaurant customers would be encouraged to spend more for the chance to earn loyalty rewards. Additionally, the Delivering on Restaurant Rewards report found, restaurant customers who belong to loyalty programs spend twice as much as those who do not. Restaurant Weeks present a unique opportunity to attract new customers while encouraging them to adopt technologies key to restaurants’ pandemic and post-pandemic survival.
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