Denver Restaurant Week one 10-day (waistband) stretch next year

The oh-so popular Denver Restaurant Week (DRW), presented by Lexus and organized by Visit Denver, will revert to a single 10-day long event in 2015, running from Feb. 20 to March 1.

“We talked to restaurant owners, restaurant employees, diners, sponsors and restaurant week fans, and the consensus was that seven days of DRW was too short, but 14 consecutive days was too long,” said Justin Bresler, vice president of marketing for Visit Denver. “The perfect ‘best of both worlds’ compromise appears to be to run it for 10 days, encompassing two complete weekends in the traditional slow period of February.”

For Denver Restaurant Week’s 10th anniversary this year, at the request of participating restaurants, DRW was split into two separate week-long events, one in February and one in late August.

“While summer restaurant week was popular with both restaurants and diners, the challenge going forward was to find a week that wasn’t already occupied by an existing event, holiday or a week that didn’t have a major convention,” Bresler said.

Late summer and fall are Denver’s busiest convention months. “We really don’t want to bring 10,000 convention delegates to Denver and have them find that every restaurant is booked with DRW reservations,” Bresler said, adding that the restaurants also don’t want to be offering special DRW pricing at a time when there are thousands of hungry convention delegates in town.

“In the end, we couldn’t find workable dates for the summer event, and the consensus of opinion was to concentrate on the traditional February time frame,” Bresler said.

More than 300 restaurants participated in the 2014 winter DRW and more than 200 in the summer DRW, making this one of the largest culinary celebrations in the nation.

Bresler stated that registration for restaurants for the 2015 DRW will begin Nov. 10 at www.denverrestaurantweek.com.
Participating restaurants again will offer a multi-course dinner for the fixed price of $30 per person. The list of participating restaurants and menus will be announced in mid-January.