Top Picks for Boston Restaurant Week 2014

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Boston Restaurant Week 2014 (now called “Dine Out Boston”) is coming soon and with 200+ menus, your choices are prodigious. I’m sure you’ve picked out a few places you want to go for restaurant week, but you should celebrate Boston’s two weeks of deliciousness by making sure to go out every night. Dine Out Boston runs from March 16 to the 28, but Saturday nights aren’t part of the festivities, so the official dates are March 16-21 and 23-28. This year’s per-person prix fixe offerings fall into three tiers for lunch or dinner, and the pricing is dependent on how many courses are offered. For lunch, you’ll pay $15, $20, or $25; for dinner you’ll pay $28, 33, or $38.

I’ve looked through all the available menus for this year’s selections and listed my favorite choices in each price tier for lunch and dinner. Boston, let the feasting begin! Read more

5 Special NYC Wine Destinations to Try

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New York City is known for its fine dining, and what would fine dining be without the wine? What follows is a roundup of some truly special destinations for the forbidden nectar in the Big Apple:

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Bitters: The Secret Ingredient for Profits

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When customers come in to your bar or restaurant and nurse a single drink for hours, it can kill your revenues. Not only is the customer a slow turnover, they also aren’t providing any extra business through ordering more drinks. What’s even worse is if the customer has simply ordered a well drink and sips on that forever. Today, we’re going to talk about a way that you can interest your customers in ordering more drinks while also increasing the price of each drink. If you’re looking for a way to increase profits on your well drinks especially, bitters may be your answer. Read more

NYC Restaurant Week 2014: Five Sizzling Choices to Beat the Winter Blahs

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In New York, it seems like people do nothing but kvetch and kvell already, and the weather hasn’t been helping. No one wants to go out and traverse the slush lakes that seem to have formed this month at every single street corner of the city, but you must! Restaurant Week 2014 is already underway in New York City – rain, sleet, snow, or hail – so what are you waiting for?

From now through March 7, almost 300 restaurants in this dining metropolis of the world will be offering lunch and dinner at a deep discount. This means three-course lunches for just $25, and three-course dinners that are going for a mere $38. People! You can barely buy a bag of groceries for that at the corner supermarket in this town, so whatever you do, don’t “fuggedabout” this.

Okay, okay – here’s the hard part: the saying goes that you could eat at a different restaurant every day for the rest of your life in New York and never run out of new options. So how exactly does one choose? Well, here are five highly recommended picks to get you started: Read more

Top 5 Restaurants You Must Try for Denver Restaurant Week

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Denver Restaurant Week is almost here, and this year is the tenth annual event. 2014 boasts a staggering number of participating restaurants, so Denverites, be ready to satiate. The prix fixe is the same for every restaurant ($30 per person) which makes it hard to narrow your options, but we’ve combed through the menus to help you make your restaurant week decisions easier. We only had room to include five restaurants on our list, but we wanted to mention two bonuses: an intriguing restaurant that we figure must be wrangling alligators in the kitchen so they can hand-trim alligator tail for their guests (Bayou Bob’s), and a restaurant that must employ wild-snail catchers, enabling them to serve locally-sourced wild snail (Coohills). Denver, you’ve got some incredible menus. Read more

How to Market Your Craft Beer Correctly

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If you’ve been carrying craft beers for a while and you haven’t experienced an upswing in business, you’re doing something wrong. Craft beer is the largest and fastest-growing segment of the beer market, and it should be giving your restaurant or bar a boost. Are you marketing to the right demographic? Here are some stats, compiled from a Nielsen-backed lecture from last year’s Craft Beer Conference. Read more

Sell More Expensive Wine With a Digital Wine Menu

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You’ve put a lot of work into making your restaurant a wonderful place to be. You have beautiful ambiance; the dishes that you serve are delicious, healthy, trendy, and fairly priced. You have a great wine menu and are good at getting people to order wine—but they only order less expensive wine, and you need your restaurant to make more money. If this sounds like you, you might need to be employing more sales techniques to convince your guests to buy higher ticket items. If you feel like you don’t want to jeopardize good relationships with your regulars by being a pushy salesperson, here are some tips and tricks for how you can get your digital wine menu cross-selling and upselling for you to sell more expensive wines, beers, or cocktails. Read more

Driving Home Patron Safety: Some Resources

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Those in the business of serving alcohol are probably already pretty well-versed in the unpleasant art of knowing when it might be time to cut a patron off. There is of course some extent to which certain laws apply; however, as a bartender, manager, or owner, at the end of the day, you really just want to do right by your fellow human beings (even when liability doesn’t necessarily come into play). What’s more, a well-earned reputation as an establishment that cares about patron safety certainly gets around. That’s why it’s always a great idea to have some resources readily available to empower your patrons to make wise decisions, getting themselves (and one another) home safely.

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The Bloody Mary Recipe for Success

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The creation of the Bloody Mary recipe was traditionally attributed to Fernand Petiot, a bartender at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris in 1924. He named his invention the “Bucket of Blood,” but the name didn’t catch on (thank goodness). Ninety years later, the world is still crazy for Bloody Marys, and the make-your-own Bloody Mary bar has become a selling point of many brunches. If you’re considering adding a Bloody Mary bar to your restaurant brunch menu, we think that’s a bloody good idea. To help you out, we’re offering a few ideas for recipes and garnishes to get you started on the right track, as well as a primer on what you should keep in stock at your do-it-yourself Bloody Mary bar.

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Cocktails: Flights of Fancy

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The idea of the “flight” – a sampling of three or four drinks that share a common theme – is no longer reserved as only a way to introduce your patrons to a fantastic selection of wines. Cocktail flights have become a big hit today, too, allowing customers to try several of your specialties drinks, all for a markup that’s higher than one might pay for just one cocktail – but also for a price that’s lower than what one would have to spend on three or four (while also being a lot easier on the liver!) While wine flights might consist of a roundup of varieties based on specific grapes or regions, where cocktail flight categories are concerned, the human imagination is really the only limit. New York City’s Flatiron Lounge, one of the first bars to offer high-end cocktails, for example, takes the lead when it comes to cocktail flight offerings, with a seasonally changing menu that includes everything from the “Flight Back in Time” to the tropical and fruity “Flight to Hawaii.”

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