The
extremely 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 Friday, February 20 to Sunday, March 1, 2015.
“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,” he
said.
For
Denver Restaurant Week’s 10th anniversary in 2014, 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 on Monday, November 10 at DenverRestaurantWeek.com.
Participating restaurants will once again offer a multi-course dinner
for the fixed price of $30 per person that was introduced in 2014. The
list of participating restaurants and menus will be announced in
mid-January.
