This Sunday marks the beginning of what we hope becomes a regular event in Santa Fe; Restaurant Week!  More than 40 restaurants are participating in the event, offering discounts and special events all week long. Most of our favorite Santa Fe restaurants are participating, and we plan to spend a fair amount of time wining and dining all week long. You too should revisit some of your favorites, and perhaps find something new.

Santa Fe New Mexican Article:

Culinary crescendo: Restaurant Week to debut in Santa FeEvent featuring lower-priced meals, cooking demonstrations and workshops puts spotlight on food industry

Arin McKenna | For The New Mexican

It’s no secret that Santa Fe’s restaurants have been looking for ways to boost business in the late winter months.

In fact, last September they agreed to work toward holding a winter fiesta in 2011. But that was before Michele Ostrove, president of Wings Media Network, a public-relations and marketing firm, and her husband, Lucien Bonnafoux, stepped in and advanced the timetable.

A month after the meeting, the couple pitched the idea of New Mexico Restaurant Week to local restaurateurs, hoteliers and representatives from key tourism agencies.

“We had been talking about a winter/spring event that would feature the restaurants of Santa Fe and promote them at a time when typically it’s not very busy,” said Jeff Jinnett, president of the Santa Fe Restaurant Association.

The idea took off. Next week, about 40 restaurants in Santa Fe — and the week after, some 20 in the Albuquerque area — will be offering lower-priced meals to diners, as well as cooking demonstrations, workshops and wine and beer tastings.

In Santa Fe, the event lasts from Sunday through March 6 locally and from March 7-13 in Albuquerque.

Ostrove and Bonnafoux, co-founders of Wine Adventure, a wine magazine for women, moved to Santa Fe in 2008 from San Diego, where they said Restaurant Week was so successful that it’s now a twice-a-year event. “They started with 60 restaurants and they’re now up to 180 to 220, depending on the season,” Ostrove said. “It just seemed like it was a natural to bring to New Mexico.”

The key players agreed. “I thought it was a hot idea,” said Restaurant Association Secretary Michael O’Reilly. Officials at the Santa Fe Wine and Chile Fiesta, whose goal is to promote Santa Fe as a culinary destination, also signed on.

The boards of both organizations promoted the event to members and agreed to subsidize them. Participating restaurants pay $500 to cover the cost of organizing and marketing the event. The fiesta offered to pay $250 of that cost for all its 2009 participants. And the Restaurant Association contributed $50 toward the entrance fees of its members.

“My hope is that events like this will get the restaurant community more united,” Jinnett said. “There are 200-plus restaurants in Santa Fe, and together we have a very powerful voice, but it’s been difficult to organize. I think the more of these types of events that we can do to get the restaurateurs to unite for a common cause is good for any type of organization.”

Simon Brackley, president and CEO of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce, which is distributing information about the event to members and visitors, called Restaurant Week “a good example of a collaborative effort to create something new in challenging economic times.”

Although there are fewer participating restaurants in Albuquerque, that city is also trying to build culinary tourism, according to Tania Armenta, vice president of marketing for the Albuquerque Convention & Visitors Bureau. “We hosted our first culinary press trip in November and had journalists come out specifically to cover the area from the culinary aspect, and we talked about Restaurant Week,” she said.

Gov. Bill Richardson and the New Mexico Tourism Department also are backing the event. “Offering something new and fresh and bringing people during a time when they typically aren’t coming in droves” is important to the state’s economy, said Jennifer Hobson, deputy secretary for the New Mexico Tourism Department. Tourism, she pointed out, is a $5.5 billion business in the state, second to oil and gas.

The Tourism Department is supporting Restaurant Week through a link on its Web site, www.newmexico.org, which gets about 150,000 hits per month. (Hobson is blogging about the event there as well.)

Launching a new event when the economy is depressed might seem risky, but Michel Darmon, director of food and beverage for Terra at Encantado, said, “I think that when we look back at it in the next few years we’ll go, ‘Wow, this is one of the great decisions of Santa Fe.’ ”

Although many anticipate limited success the first year, they expect to see the event’s popularity grow rapidly. “If it works as well as we believe it will, I think everybody will want to be in on the next one,” Ostrove said. “And I’m really grateful for the people who did take the leap of faith this time and come aboard.”

“I’m hoping that when the dust settles at the end of the week, the overall feedback from the restaurants is, ‘I’m really glad that I participated. It was fun, the staff enjoyed it, we had a lot of people who had not been to our restaurant before that are now exposed to it and we can’t wait for next year,’ ” Jinnett said. “And my hope is that the restaurants that didn’t participate because they were skeptical go, ‘Wow, we really missed out, and we’re not going to miss out next time.’ ”

Bonnafoux said the next Restaurant Week could be as early as November. “I like to let the train get going down the tracks before we pull the switch,” he said. “We want to get the statistics first, but we believe this one will be so successful that it will warrant another in early November.”

Link To Original Article Here

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