Saratoga County restaurant week, an annual event intended to support local businesses, is back.
The Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce began coordinating the annual culinary celebration in 2017. Beginning Wednesday, more than 50 restaurants throughout the county began featuring prix fixe breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus in an effort to attract long-time customers and create new regulars.
Chamber President Todd Shimkus says winter is the toughest season for restaurants.
“This is a nice way of promoting them, a nice way of encouraging locals to go and visit them. And not just to help the restaurants, but also those employees that work at these restaurants. You know they also suffer when people aren’t going out as much as we often do in the spring, summer, and fall. So, this helps employees and the local businesses that participate,” said Shimkus.
Kim Tribley has been running Coffee Planet in Ballston Spa since 2018. She says this is always the slowest time of year, but this week, her first time participating, her café has been packed.
“It’s awesome, so, we started, what, Wednesday, Thursday with Restaurant Week and my lunches were very busy. And people were coming in and saying ‘oh you’re part of Restaurant Week.’ So, I think it was a good thing and I look forward to doing it again next year,” said Tribley.
Jason Friedman owns Fat Paulie’s Delicatessen on Saratoga Springs’ West Side. He says his regulars have been coming in droves to try his brisket and egg breakfast sandwich.
“It’s been great. It’s a nice little uptick in business. We put a couple things on the specials that people don’t usually think about ordering usually. So, something a bit unusual, stuff that we like here that our staff here eats a lot of times, so we want to share it with everybody,” said Friedman.
Nick Porreca runs Pasta Pane in Clifton Park.
“We like to support the week because we’ve been members of the chamber for a really long time and we feel it brings in people that haven’t tried us before, maybe they saw us on the chamber website, and it also gives our regular guests that come here so frequently something to try and keeps things interesting,” said Porreca.
But Porreca didn’t stop at just serving his customers: Andrew Brodie and Sean Garrity are juniors at Christian Brotherhood Academy gunning to win an annual fundraising competition to support the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Garrity says he’s confident their team will meet their $50,000 goal with help from a portion of every Restaurant Week sale at Pasta Pane.
“The big thing, though, is that what’s important to keep in mind is at th end of the day everyone is raising for research for blood cancer and everyone ha sthe same end goal in mind: eventually finding a cure for cancer. And by doing that we sort of compete to create a way for everyone to raise as much money as they can because, obviously, if we bring competition into things, people get competitive,” said Garrity.
Restaurant Week runs through Thursday.