Restaurant Week summer 2022 features more than 500 eateries

Thirty years, 30 days and $30 bottles of wine.

In a town where $30 more often gets you half a bottle of vino instead of a whole one, New York City restaurants are celebrating the 30th year of Restaurant Week by making it a month long — and offering cut-rate libation.

This week is your last chance to get in on the specials, as it ends on Aug. 21.

More than 600 restaurants in all five boroughs are participating this summer. On top of prix-fixe specials for two-course lunches and three-course dinners for $30, $45 and $60, 100 restaurants are offering $30 bottles of wine.

Stretching it out over a month is a boon, said Tren’ness Woods, a spokeswoman for soul food staple Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem and the culinary co-chair of Restaurant Week.

“It’s great. It gives you more opportunity to reach more people,” Woods told the Daily News. It lends “support of a major marketing and tourism and hospitality agency that is well informed and able to produce a campaign that individual restaurants can’t do on their own.”

Restaurant Week’s main focus is on getting people to try new restaurants and dishes, said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance. This year, like last year, there’s an added impetus to coax people back to restaurants, “particularly now as we’re trying to emerge from the worst of the pandemic,” Rigie added.

[ Ten tasty-looking Restaurant Week specials worth trying during its 30th year ]

“New York City’s restaurant industry was devastated by the pandemic,” Rigie told The News. “And while we’re in a much better place than we were a year ago, there’s still a long road to recovery.”

Many eateries still have pandemic debt, he noted, especially since 65% of New York City restaurants were shut out of revitalization grants when the money ran dry and the feds declined to replenish the fund, he said.

“Today the industry is slowly coming back. Customers are in general supportive, coming out to eat and support the industry, which is fantastic,” Melissa Autilio Fleischut, president and CEO of the New York State Restaurant Association, said. “But the expense side of things has definitely impacted the bottom line of all the restaurants across the state.”

Increased pricing for food, energy, labor and rent are among many financial pressures on the industry, she said. For instance, food prices have risen between 15% and 17% year-over-year, but menu prices have only gone up between 7% and 8%, Fleischut said.

“Sales are not back to the 2019 level yet in the city in particular, but they’re getting closer to probably 80, 90%,” Fleischut said. “But the expense side is really crushing their ability to make a profit right now.”

While the industry is slowly bouncing back, some business may be lost forever. In Midtown and lower Manhattan, “office workers have not returned close to pre-pandemic levels, and they may never,” Rigie noted.

Breaking News

As it happens

Get updates on the coronavirus pandemic and other news as it happens with our free breaking news email alerts.

Likewise, though tourists are returning, their numbers have not rebounded to the annual 70 million visitors who used to flood the city before 2020.

Many restaurants are adjusting their hours based on those trends, Fleischut said, which can be deceiving when it’s hard to get a table.

“Even though it looks like things are back to normal, things aren’t really back to normal compared to what it looked like before the pandemic,” she explained.

Between that and staffing shortages, the industry still employs 50,000 fewer people than it did before. Pre-pandemic, the city’s restaurant industry employed more than 320,000 people, Rigie said.

“Those jobs took a nosedive” when restaurants closed by April 2020, the industry only employed about 90,000 people in the city, he said.

The prix-fixe menus this month give budget-conscious diners, who are also feeling the effects of inflation and economic upheaval, the chance to try new things they might not otherwise be able to afford, Fleischut noted.

“It’s about driving customers to dine out at restaurants and to expose customers to new restaurants that they may not even have tried if it weren’t for Restaurant Week,” Rigie said. “There’s still disruption, there’s still challenges, but we’re cautiously optimistic because people still do want to be out, drink, socialize.”