New York City’s bi-annual Restaurant Week starts July 20 and goes through August 16. This event celebrates the city’s culinary scene by offering special promotions. Participating restaurants — between 600 and 650 in all five boroughs — will offer prix-fixe meals that include brunches, lunches, and dinners set at prices between $30, $45, and $60, available Mondays through Fridays each week. This event revolutionized the global dining industry, and inspired similar events occurring all over 70 cities in the United States and 20 countries.
Restaurant Week — created by Tim Zagat (co-founder of The Zagat Survey) and Joe Baum (famous restauranteur) — made its debut in July 1992 following the Democratic National Convention. Its goal was to feed the hundreds of journalists and delegates attending the convention, offering a variety of meals for the price of $19.92 (a number that matched the year). The many reporters and delegates that visited Midtown were overwhelmed by its vast array and prices of everyday food. To fix this, Zagat and Baum created a four-day promotion to encourage dining out, as well as to make it more accessible and price-friendly, making sure everyone would be able to eat. One hundred top tier NYC restaurants participated in the event and gathered not only tourists but locals — making Restaurant Week a huge success and eventually a bi-annual event (occuring in the summer and winter). It now runs as a month-long festival, continuing its purpose of supporting independent restaurants and allowing visitors to get the full NYC culinary experience.
NYC’s culinary scene is universally regarded as one of the best and most diverse in the world, home to many foods other than the city’s iconic pizza, cheesecake, and pastrami sandwiches. The ability to dive into widely different food cultures from every continent is one subway ride away. The city offers hundreds of different global cuisines and styles of restaurants, from street-carts to fancier sit down locations. Restaurant Week has been the city’s biggest event to uplift the highly experimental and avant-garde culinary scene that has pushed the boundaries of traditional dining.
Restaurant Week continues to be an equalizer, with its prix-fixe model breaking down economic barriers of elite establishments, and making them just as available as dive-bars and diners. Apart from feeding tourists and locals, Restaurant Week assists NYC restaurateurs thrive during slow-season and helps restaurants to stay in business. Historically, mid-summer and mid-winter are notorious slow economic periods for restaurants. Baum and Zagat’s coordinated discount flips the precedent by making slow seasons a peak dining period that keeps the city’s culinary world more diverse than it’s ever been. The immense success of Restaurant Week and its goal has spread to support dozens of events in other cities, like Los Angeles’s Dine LA and Florida’s Miami Spice.
To keep track of promotions, schedules, reservations, and restaurants participating in this season’s event, visit NYC Tourism + Conventions.