Ask The Groove: Do restaurants discount prix-fixe food after Valentine's Day?

Q: I heard restaurants with Valentine's Day prix fixe deals will often add any surplus to their specials board the following night. Maybe it will be an individual item from their menu, or something else using the same higher quality/speciality ingredients. Is this really a thing? 

It makes sense, in the way that bite-size Snickers and Almond Joys are on sale the week after Halloween. The laws of supply and demand are deeply at play when it comes to holiday consumption, so if you play your hand right, there is a surplus to be exploited. But does this conceit work for obnoxiously overpriced Valentine’s Day prix fixe dinners? 

We posed the question to some local chefs and other folks in the restaurant business on whether or not it makes sense to celebrate V-Day in the days after the holiday (yes, of course it does) due to the heavily-discounted bargains they’ll be getting (well, not exactly). 

“It’s a common practice for Valentine’s Day prix fixes to take existing items you already have on your menu and switch between presentations, or sub in an ingredient and charge out the ass for it,” relayed one sous chef who wanted to remain anonymous. “But things like steak dinners, lava cakes etcetera, they’re all built into the restaurant’s existing model.” 

This means that many joints don’t sweat the leftovers, they simply throw whatever stock they didn’t sell to the love-addled suckers during their V-Day gouging back into their regular rotation at normal prices.

“It’s not a guarantee, but the day after [Valentine’s Day] is usually pretty slow, so you’re likely to catch specials."

For instance, if the restaurant serves veggie rigatoni 364 days a year but for their V-Day prix fixe they’re making it pop with a particularly rich boutique-butcher lamb sausage, don’t expect the pasta to be on fire sale the next week. These places aren’t losing money if love doesn’t happen to be in the air that season, they are hoping to just use love like a buoy.

“Valentine’s Day is a possible light at the end of dismal January slow seasons for restaurants, and they will exploit the shit out of it, if possible,” said a worker at an Italian restaurant in the East Village. 

Seeing as the holiday schedule is already accounted for in the annual outlook — Valentine’s Day often marks the start of the post-Dry January resurgence that pulls everyone out of the red — most restaurants are prepared for any extra stock they still have after the holiday.

“If the chef is smart and is used to it, they will just slightly pepper it with new shit they could easily get rid of over the weekend,” the worker said. “That’s why those [prix fixe] nights are usually a smaller menu, and that’s all you can order.” 

That said, there are still some potential deals for keen-eyed menu watchers. 

“If you order a bunch of, let’s say, lobsters for Valentine’s Day, and you don’t sell them all, what are you gonna do? Throw them out? Fuck no,” a local fishmonger told us. “You’re gonna special it until they’re gone!” 

While the item may not be prepped the exact same way as the prix fixe menu, as the kitchen will go back to normal service, chefs and owners still have to figure out something to do with the leftovers.

“It’s not a guarantee, but the day after [Valentine’s Day] is usually pretty slow, so you’re likely to catch specials,” said the fishmonger. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see oyster and lobster specials [this year]. Lots of places that otherwise wouldn’t sell those order them just for Valentine’s Day.” 

A few days later, this same monger texted an update: “A restaurant that almost never buys lobster bought about 80 pounds off me today. Just saying,” they said. “Another one pre-ordered a fuck ton of scallops. They usually buy, like, four pounds.”

And since fish doesn’t keep too long, so maybe that’s the best route to catch a deal.

The big hitch to that scheme this year is that Valentine’s Day falls on a Friday, meaning the celebration will extend the holiday into at least Saturday, if not the entire weekend, which leads to more opportunities for overstocked restaurants to get rid of their excess supply, meaning fewer potential deals.

Then again, if your romantic partner can wait a day or two, isn’t it better to time-shift the corporate holiday and not wrestle with the hordes of basics out there paying disgusting prices on the most annoying dining day of the year? 

Perhaps that, in itself, is reward enough.