The Margherita Pizza served as part of the $20 Saratoga Restaurant Week menu. (Their photo, not mine; my pizza was gone before I could take a photo.)
The first hard frost of the season is predicted for tonight, but I’m going out because we’re in the midst of Saratoga Restaurant Week. You can find our 2019 Saratoga County Restaurant Week offerings here.
As usual, some places look at Restaurant Week as bonus publicity for their regular menu. They’ll toss in a cookie with their regular burger and chips and call it their $10 lunch special. Or they’ll take advantage of their free listing and say they are participating and not bother to put up a menu at all. Not cool, and we will remember.
The best places will put together an inventive menu that does not have too high a food cost but really shows off what the restaurant can do. This is how you attract new customers or reactivate past customers, as in the example of the $20 menu from Taverna Novo which offered the soup of the day, a margherita pizza and a generous slice of pistachio cheesecake made in house.
Tomorrow night (the menu says it’s served starting Wednesday, but they weren’t ready) you can have Dominic Colose’s new Mediterranean-inspired menu also for $20. Dominic used to rail against restaurant weeks in his blog, so I’m happy he’s come around.
There’s also a $30 menu level which provides some wiggle room for fine-dining places like Salt & Char and The Blue Hen*, but you can also find some modest spots here where it would be hard to drop $30 at regular prices. I think I’ll stick to the $20 establishments and there are more than enough of those to last me till Sunday.
*Blue Hen also has a $35 prix fixe menu which includes a glass of wine and selections you may prefer to the Restaurant Week menu, and it’s available on a regular basis.
