Restaurateurs are tickled pink about Valentine’s Day gift as they expect it to prove a red-letter day in sore economic times.
“It’s our busiest ever,” said Carlos Slaughter, owner of D. Carlo Trattoria.
He has reservations for 300 people for tomorrow and expects the whole weekend to be busy, said Slaughter, who has owned the restaurant on Douglas Pike in Smithfield for about four years.
“It could just be the convenience of it because it’s on a Saturday,” he said.
Whatever the reason, Slaughter and other restaurant owners say they are happy for the business in such a brutal environment for the dining industry.
Forty-eight percent of U.S. consumers are eating out less often now than six months ago, necklaces according to Morpace, a Michigan market research company.
“This consumer retrenchment is significant,” said Kirsten Denyes, a Morpace vice president, “and it indicates more weakness for the restaurant industry.
“By last September, more than one-third of consumers had reduced restaurant dining — but now it’s almost half the population,” she said.
The National Restaurant Association forecasts overall restaurant sales will go up 2.5 percent this year. But when adjusted for inflation, sales will drop 1 percent.
A federation executive, Hudson Riehle, speaking during a December media conference, called this “the most challenging period for the industry in several decades.”
Restaurant owners aren’t blind to the empty seats in their dining rooms and are trying any number of tactics to lure customers — changing menus to include less-pricey ingredients, offering smaller portions, fixed-price meals and coupons, among other things.
Blaze, on Providence’s East Side, saw a slightly larger post-holiday dip this year than in previous cufflinks years, said Carol Edmonds, the manager.
“I find that [business] is picking up more right now,” she said. “In the beginning, you could tell people were afraid to dine out.”
The restaurant is one of many this year offering prix fixe selections — a collection of predetermined items presented as a multicourse meal at a set price.
It’s the first time for Blaze, Edmonds said. She’s unsure whether the offerings are contributing to the high number of Valentine’s Day reservations, which has forced her to cap them.
“If we take additional reservations,” she said, “we won’t be able to take walk-ins.”
At Persimmon, in Bristol, owner Champe Speidel retooled his buying to reduce prices.
“We got deals on big quantities of meat and break them down into small portions,” he said.
The menu now includes “tasting plates,” three or four bites of food with “really powerful flavors” sold for $5 to $9. Some diners buy more than one and share them, as they would with Chinese dim sum.
The lower-priced items have dropped sales somewhat, Speidel said, but “check averages have not money clips fluctuated in a way that makes me nervous.”
Some restaurants, like Blaze, offer coupons.
Studies by Technomic Inc., a market research firm in Chicago, show that 60 percent of people surveyed use coupons “sometimes” or “all the time” at restaurants.
Restaurant coupon redemption is fairly spread out among income brackets.
“If anything, more consumers in some of the higher annual household income brackets report using coupons at restaurants than do those in some of the lower brackets,” Technomic reported.
Carlos Slaughter doesn’t use coupons at his Smithfield restaurant.
Instead, he’s developing an e-mail list of regular customers so he can target bangles his discounts.
“That’s kind of a way to go around and promote business,” he said.